Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures Beyond Ecommerce Marketing Podcast features Kelsey O’Rourke, the performance marketing director at Stryde, discussing Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram) strategies for 2025. Kelsey shares insights on crafting effective creative strategies, adapting to Meta’s increasing automation, leveraging AI for cost-effective content creation, and avoiding common mistakes in ad campaigns. The conversation emphasizes the importance of evergreen content, user-generated content (UGC), and metrics like thumb-stop rate and click-through rate over traditional ROAS for better campaign optimization. Kelsey also highlights the role of Meta Ads in an omnichannel strategy, emphasizing their effectiveness in top-of-funnel prospecting while integrating broader marketing channels like Google Ads, email, and SEO.
Key Takeaways
- Creative Strategy is Crucial: In 2025, brands must prioritize evergreen content, UGC, and video formats to stand out in Meta’s algorithm, which increasingly favors engaging creative over hyper-targeted campaigns.
- Metrics Beyond ROAS: Brands should focus on engagement metrics like thumb-stop rate, click-through rate, and average video play time, as these directly impact CPMs and campaign success.
- Leverage AI for Cost Efficiency: Tools like Creatify can help brands produce static and video content more affordably, reducing the burden of traditional creative processes while maintaining competitive ad strategies.
- Avoid Common Mistakes: Limit creative volume in campaigns, use concise ad copy, define and exclude audiences properly, and minimize audience overlap to optimize campaign performance.
- Meta Ads as a Prospecting Tool: Meta should primarily be used for acquiring new customers, supported by a strategic omnichannel approach that integrates email, SEO, and Google Ads for nurturing and retention.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- Is my Meta ad creative strategy focused on engaging and evergreen content that highlights top-performing products?
- Am I using AI tools effectively to reduce creative production costs and increase output?
- Do I have proper audience exclusions and definitions in place to ensure accurate ROAS and CPA measurements?
- Am I relying too heavily on ROAS, or am I analyzing engagement metrics like thumb-stop rates to guide my strategy?
- How do Meta ads fit into my overall omnichannel strategy, and am I using them effectively for top-of-funnel prospecting?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Kelsey O’Rourke LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelseycorourke/
Creatify: https://creatify.ai/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:00.814)
Hey everyone. Welcome to the seven figures beyond ecommerce marketing podcast This is our last episode for 2024 and it’s going to be a good one
Kelsey O’Rourke (00:06.999)
Yeah. Okay. Cool.
Greg Shuey (00:26.83)
So similar to our last episode, this one was designed to help you as you’re doing your 2025 planning. I know that some brands have already started that. Some brands like to wait until the beginning of the year. So I’m hopeful that the things that we talk about today will help you start to formulate what your strategy should be in 2025. My guest today, her name is Kelsey O’Rourke, and she is our performance marketing director here at Stride.
She’s wicked smart when it comes to paid channels and that’s what we’re going to be focusing on today. We’re gonna be really zeroing in on meta ads, so your Facebook and your Instagram ads, and we are going to dive into the things that you should be thinking about as you look at your meta ad strategy. We’ve worked with a lot of brands this year on their Facebook and Instagram ads and we’ve got some really great insights that you might not be thinking of or maybe even some that you’re not aware of. So I hope that this is super valuable for you.
Kelsey, thanks so much for being with us today.
Kelsey O’Rourke (01:29.753)
Great. Thanks, Greg. It’s great to be here. I’m excited to dive into all things meta ads. I know that I’m here as an expert, quote unquote, in the space, but I personally still find it a little difficult to identify as that just given how quickly the paid media landscape changes every single day, it feels like. I guess that just makes me a little bit more humble than others, but I actually
Before I even got into digital marketing, I started in hotels. was working in ops and sales for different hotel brands. And when I switched over to the digital media side of things, I really was only supposed to be working in operations, helping to build an agency. And I learned pretty quickly that in order to help build an agency and run the operations, you needed to understand.
all things as it relates to campaigns as well as strategy. And I also realized that I really liked it. So I took special interest in it, but part of that was I didn’t know how to hire somebody who was a paid social expert or somebody who was a paid search expert. And I didn’t even know how to manage those kinds of people when I started because I didn’t have the knowledge. So I was forced to learn that in order to be good at the job I was hired to do.
but I also really, really enjoyed it. And so the way that I learned and really the person I owe pretty much all of the credit to outside of my own ability to apply myself is Stephanie. She’s the founder of Spray Marketing and she’s got over 15 years of experience in the paid media space, not even just paid media, but I would say full phone and marketing. She acts as a fractional CMO for a number of different e-commerce brands as well as consumer healthcare brands.
that are really looking to scale and or raise that next round of funding. And she took me under her wing and taught me pretty much everything I know and helped me form my quote unquote expertise in digital media channels. And we worked on building spray marketing together at the same time that was happening. So I really owe a lot of credit to her and obviously my ability to apply and learn from there. But she’s
Kelsey O’Rourke (03:52.535)
super talented, super smart, and a lot of that paid off. I kind of went through the boot camp there and now I shyly identify as an expert and paid me and paid me.
Greg Shuey (04:07.342)
That’s awesome. She sounds amazing. And I guess I owe her a thank you because a lot of what you’re using, you know, for our clients is, you know, directly from her. So that’s awesome. Well, we’re excited for you to be here today. Thank you for sharing a little bit about yourself. Are you ready to jump in?
Kelsey O’Rourke (04:12.173)
you
Kelsey O’Rourke (04:19.085)
Yeah, definitely.
Kelsey O’Rourke (04:25.935)
Mm-hmm.
Kelsey O’Rourke (04:29.581)
Yeah, let’s go for it for sure.
Greg Shuey (04:31.756)
Let’s go for it. This is her first podcast, by the way, everyone. Maybe she’s a little nervous. We’ll see.
Kelsey O’Rourke (04:37.967)
I’m not sweating, but I’m sweating.
Greg Shuey (04:42.446)
but she’s also in Florida, so it’s hot there. It’s not. All right. So as we have gone through the last 12 months, lot, a lot’s happened in terms of, you know, marketing in general. So what are some of the biggest trends that you’re seeing in meta ads right now? And then how do you think those are going to evolve even further as we move through 2025?
Kelsey O’Rourke (04:45.197)
This is true.
Kelsey O’Rourke (04:54.159)
Mm-hmm.
Kelsey O’Rourke (05:12.771)
Yeah, I think that one of the biggest trends that everybody is really talking about is AI, which I think something we’ll dive into today for sure in more detail. And I also think that a really large trend in the meta space currently is what is my creative strategy? It’s a question I think a lot of brands are asking themselves, especially brands that I would consider to be on the quote unquote smaller side. And when I say smaller, I don’t mean to
minimize them in any way, but I just mean not the Coca-Cola’s and not the Ubers of the world, these smaller e-commerce brands that are just getting started or even in the lead gen space. They’re really struggling to think about what is a creative strategy? What does that actually mean? How do I build one? How does it affect my paid media? But as meta continues to move to be more and more automated, it’s really taking away what us as marketers know.
that we are supposed to do in order to make our ads perform. Because as marketers that have grown up in the last 10 to 15 years in the professional space, so much of what Metta was, was the ability to have hyper-focused targeting on different interest layers, as well as different demographics and things like that. And as it becomes more more automated, a lot of those abilities from a targeting perspective are being taken away from us. A lot of it has to do with…
the lack of first party data and what happened with iOS 14.5 a few years ago. And it’s just become increasingly more difficult to apply the standard marketing tactics. having a really strong creative strategy is definitely gonna be a trend that we see in 2025 and leveraging AI for that, as well as leveraging…
Evergreen and relying less on promotion periods I think are going to be some big factors and I think the other third one would probably be UGC. I think it’s a big area that a lot of smaller brands are not investing in for what makes sense currently because UGC to a smaller brand feels very expensive, but there are definitely ways that are there are definitely ways and tools that are making it significantly more express accessible for brands to
Kelsey O’Rourke (07:35.465)
utilize and have a stronger UGC strategy and making that a part of their overall creative strategy. So I think that’s kind of where I would focus. I know a lot of that speaks to creative, which is probably not what any brand wants to hear because they just see dollar signs. But with the lack of the ability to target, the only thing that’s going to drive the algorithm and meta is going to be creative. yeah.
Greg Shuey (07:59.31)
creative piece of it. Yeah, you and I have extensive conversations about this over the last you know month or so what does creative look like in 2025 so let’s uh let’s focus some time there so how should brands be thinking about their creative strategy like are there new formats that they should be thinking about I we just
Kelsey O’Rourke (08:11.545)
Fishy man.
Greg Shuey (08:24.952)
briefly touched on UGC. I know that’s not a new format, but like you mentioned, lot of brands aren’t doing that. Or are there any new approaches that are performing particularly well that that brand should be really paying attention to?
Kelsey O’Rourke (08:39.917)
Yeah, I think one thing that I’ve noticed a lot of brands really missing the mark on is meeting the customers where they are. So a lot of these smaller e-commerce brands or smaller consumer healthcare brands, et cetera, a lot of times get bogged down in this creative space of we have this new collection that’s launching, so we need to focus on that. Or we have an Easter promotion coming up, so we need to focus on that.
Greg Shuey (08:48.279)
Mm-hmm.
Kelsey O’Rourke (09:07.235)
And what happens when you start to focus on these individual campaigns and these smaller promotion periods that I would not consider major, quite frankly, Easter is not a time where people are thinking, this is a great time for me to go buy a new dress. Like that doesn’t relate, right? People are thinking during maybe Memorial Day, this is the time to go buy four new dresses because I know that that’s a major sale period. But what happens when brands start focusing on these smaller campaigns is they end up
recycling new content too often for the amount of money that they’re currently spending in their meta ads. So meeting the customers where they are, what I mean is just what is evergreen for your brand? What’s your top selling product? If you have 30 SKUs, the chances that all 30 SKUs are selling the same volume are probably extremely unlikely. So what are the top five? Like what are really, what’s really driving your business and focus on that because what I think this will lead into another.
topic we’re to talk about later, but Meta is really should be servicing as a prospecting net new consumer platform. And when you’re not focusing on what’s evergreen and what has high conversion rates for your brand, just generally speaking, you’re basically throwing a bunch of like new stuff and small promos at a bucket of people who don’t know anything about your brand. They don’t even know why they should be shopping your brand. I think refocusing and meeting them where they already are is the first
most important part of any sort of creative strategy for 2025. I think in addition, brands really need to think about other metrics other than ROAS. And I think this relates to creative because so many e-commerce brands, if you ask them what metric they look at, it’s ROAS. It’s always ROAS. It’s never CPA. It’s never conversion rates.
but ROAS is so dependent on what your AOV is and what your CPA is. your AOV, an agency and a consultant, like we can’t really control what that is. That’s the price of your products and how you’re structuring them. Like if someone coming to your store and buying more than one at a time, then your AOV could go from 25 to 75. Or are you selling a super expensive product that’s $300, then your ROAS is.
Kelsey O’Rourke (11:31.445)
most likely always going to look healthier, but your CPA is still going to be quite high because it’s considered a high consideration product. I think what brands, especially smaller brands, they get really focused on those like down funnel metrics like ROAS and then they forget to think about what’s happening at the engagement side. Meta is an engagement platform, CPMs are what you pay in the auction.
Meta determines what you pay in the auction based on how engaging your content is and as well as what it provides for the end user in terms of the best viewing experience. So if you’re not thinking about that and you’re just thinking, if I have an Easter promo, it’s going to potentially increase ROAS by this much, you’re not really doing yourself a favor long term. You’re really fixing and fixating on a short term solution. And then when you think about looking at a new collection, for example.
Like if I am Sally and I have never heard of brand A and you tell me brand A has a new collection coming out, why do I care? I don’t care. I need to be told what is, you know, I’m brand A and this is the product that a hundred thousand people have bought. Now Sally is interested because a hundred thousand people have bought this. So you’re really needing to, again, bring back that evergreen content, but think about how to create engaging content as well, because ultimately
Greg Shuey (12:32.206)
Yeah.
Kelsey O’Rourke (12:53.039)
Meta’s algorithm looks at thousands of data points to determine what your CPMs are, but some of those are click through rate, which you have the ability to view. Another one is thumb stop rate. Thumb stop rate is a metric that not a lot of brands look at, but what that means is the number of users that are watching your video for at least three seconds divided by the total impressions, which gives you a percentage rate. And there’s benchmarks that you want to be at for different industries that brands can
hold themselves and measure themselves against. And if your thumb stop rate is too low, then that means your content’s not engaging enough at the beginning of the video. And so that means the beginning of the first three seconds of your video isn’t capturing a user and we need to change that. Another one is average video play time, something that most brands are also not looking at, which there’s again benchmarks that you can look at, but these are some metrics that.
You can see as a user, as an agency, as a consultant, even as a brand owner, you can go into Meta’s platform and look at those metrics and understand how you’re performing. And those are things that directly play into the auction and Meta determining what you pay from a CPM perspective. I think the other thing is UDC. We talked about it a little bit, but Meta is continuing to evolve because it has to compete with platforms like TikTok, which are video only platforms.
And when I say evolve, they’re just favoring video content. That’s a nice way of saying you need to invest in video content. And UGC is the best way to do it because it blends into the feed the most seamlessly, right? These like highly produced brand videos that we used to see in meta ads, you don’t really see anymore. We saw them, you know, three, four years ago. They were everywhere.
Greg Shuey (14:19.148)
Right.
Kelsey O’Rourke (14:40.889)
but they’re almost non-existent now. And it’s because Meta is really just favoring that UTC content because it captures the user’s attention better because it feels more natural to the feed. It’s not the end all be all. You don’t need to only have video, but it just really begs the question of if you’re not investing in video, why? And then figuring out the solution from there. And I think that’s where a lot of smaller brands need to really think about their creative strategy and kind of refocusing.
where they’re putting their efforts in 2025.
Greg Shuey (15:15.136)
Now, I’m sure that folks listening to this are wondering, how much creative do I need? Like you mentioned, they’re just seeing dollar signs, right? And I know that it’s going to be different for every brand, but do you have a general recommendation? You should have this much new UGC coming out every single month, or is it just, do your best.
Kelsey O’Rourke (15:23.055)
I love this question.
Kelsey O’Rourke (15:39.383)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love this question. Just like the TikTok sound, I love this question. It’s probably the most asked question I get immediately after me telling somebody that they need to invest in UTC.
Brands that are not spending that much on meta don’t need to be producing UDC more than once a quarter. And you probably don’t need more than like four to five video concepts, I would say. And in that four to five, it could really be two concepts that each have an A-B test and then one third concept that’s just like a, we just wanna see what happens with this. We just wanna see if people engage with this particular messaging. So it doesn’t need to be this massive lift.
When you’re spending more, you need more creative because you cycle through it more often. But when you’re not spending that much, you don’t need that much. And quite frankly, this is something we’re also going to talk about later, just the number of creative elements that I see in brands campaigns when I go into them to audit them is honestly a lot of the time quite astonishing. I’m not sure why someone who’s spending
$3,000 a month has 20 ad creatives in one campaign. Meta has no idea what to do with that. There’s not enough money to go around to all of those creatives for it to be used effectively. So less is more as long as the content is engaging and as long as it’s strong content, right? I think brands overproduce when they are producing just to produce with no direction and no strategy behind it.
Greg Shuey (17:21.314)
Got it. Okay, sweet. All right, let’s talk about AI. The big question mark for a lot of people, like what role does AI play in meta advertising? And then how do you see brands using that in 2025?
Kelsey O’Rourke (17:40.483)
I think AI is an interesting tool. Meta, think, is still in the process of developing it and integrating it into its actual platform. However, I think where it can provide the biggest value for brands currently is in creative output because ultimately everything I just said, like we talked about, just drives dollar signs through the founder’s mind, right?
using an AI tool to mass produce static assets and even create video assets, whether that’s UGC or just video assets of existing content that’s being cut up, it’s going to significantly cut back on your creative output as well as cut back on the cost because it’s being done by AI, it’s not being done by a human. the world in which
a creative brief and then a storyboard needed to be developed and then a client meeting needed to happen and then the assets needed to be handed over and then a designer needed to design it and then et cetera, et cetera. I could go on. It’s exhausting to even think about, but this is what scares people from developing video creative because it’s got like 20 steps involved and you’ve got a video designer that’s, you know, $150 an hour. And now I’m like, all I’m seeing is dollar signs, but AI can really, I think provide
a way to cut back on cost as well as cut back on just overall creative output that’s needed from inside the brand. There’s a tool out there that I have recently started using that I find pretty interesting. called Creatify. It allows you to not only create large volumes of static assets just by simply uploading your images of your products. It’s going to write the text overlay. It’s going to create multiple different variations for you, but it also has the ability to create
video assets in two different ways. One way is just taking own video clips. Like if you’re the founder of a bike brand, it’s just you out there like videotaping somebody on the bike, videotaping you building the bike, like these little 10 second clips, uploading those, letting it put them together into a highlight reel and then adding a script or text overlay onto it for you. And you’re not having to write any of those things. It also has the ability to create utilize.
Kelsey O’Rourke (19:58.409)
UTC AI avatars, which I think some people are a little bit weirded out by. I’m not fully on board with them, but they’ve become extremely lifelike in the last year, I would say. It looks like a person.
Greg Shuey (20:10.862)
It’s wild. She showed me a couple of weeks ago. I was like, this isn’t real. This, no, like, it’s so good.
Kelsey O’Rourke (20:18.371)
Mm-hmm. It’s pretty crazy how life like these people are and, you know, what used to take weeks to develop a single UGC content where you have to ship the product, have them film it, et cetera. You can have something. It’s not going to be of the same quality of a real user, right? But you could have a video produced in three hours instead of weeks. So.
There’s a couple of different platforms that do similar things like this. Creatify is just the one that I have found to be most successful with, but it really will allow especially these smaller brands to stay competitive in the market space. The market is so oversaturated, especially e-commerce, with and not even in just one vertical. Every vertical is oversaturated. Everything on Instagram, if it’s not someone you personally know, 80 % of your feed is an ad from some brand.
or boosted posts from some brand. And having the ability to produce that UGC quickly and in a cost effective way, I think is really going to be a game changer for a lot of these brands that have maybe been scared to dip their toes in that space previously.
Greg Shuey (21:35.448)
Yeah, I like that. So shifting gears, let’s talk about mistakes. You can make a lot of mistakes with your meta ads, with any kind of ads, right? So as you’ve audited accounts this year, what are some of the big mistakes that you see brands and agencies working for brands make on these ads?
Kelsey O’Rourke (21:44.527)
you
Kelsey O’Rourke (21:57.935)
Yeah, think there’s four that really stand out to me for meta ads. The first is that there’s too much creative. I promise everything else is not creative related because that seems to be the theme of this podcast accident, but there’s too much creative. You don’t need 20 different ads in an ad set that’s spending $25 a day. Meta will never know what to do with it and its algorithm therefore is not working as effectively as it should.
So just reduce the amount of creatives you have. Just cut back. Less is more. Learn to edit better. And you can have 20 variations of creative if you have drastically different audiences that you’re targeting. So you might have four in one audience, four in another audience, four in another audience, and then maybe you have the other four and you’re retargeting. But you don’t need to put them all together. It’s really the name of the game. The second thing is ad copy is way too long.
so many ad accounts. Meta penalizes you in the auction if your ad copy is too long. the shorter the better. So again, this is like the less is more tactic that you’re probably going to hear me say that a lot today. But when you have ad copy that’s too long within Meta, you can’t actually read it. So the user has to press these three little circular buttons that are next to the end of the copy.
in order for them to expand it. So they’re not even, and the chances of that happening. No, no one’s doing that. So you’re effectively wasting your breath. You’re wasting your copywriter’s time and you’re wasting your brand’s voice because nobody is reading that. It’s just not worth it. And it’s penalizing you in the auction. So it’s working against you and it’s a waste of your resources. So it’s just two things that are, I guess, unnecessary. The third and probably one of the
Greg Shuey (23:28.588)
That’s beyond us. We all love doing that.
Kelsey O’Rourke (23:53.891)
biggest issues that I see is a lack of proper audience exclusions and audience definitions in campaigns. this is obviously something you and I have talked about at Lang. But when meta is being set up for prospecting new consumers, you need to be excluding people who would fall into your engaged and or current consumer categories. So
The way I look at engaged, these are people who have engaged with the brand. They’ve visited your website, they’ve added something to their cart, they have signed up for an email newsletter, they have liked something on your page, they’ve engaged with your Instagram post, they’ve watched a video on your Instagram, et cetera, but they’ve never purchased, right? So they know who you are as a brand, but for whatever reason, they haven’t actually converted a purchase. And then when I think about current consumers, this is just people who have purchased from your brand before.
So if you’re running a prospecting campaign, don’t you want to exclude these people? Because if you’re not excluding these people, how do you actually know what your true net new user cost per acquisition is and therefore the ROAS for your net new user? You don’t. You just don’t. And without proper exclusions, brands are really flying blind, I would say, in terms of what their true cost per acquisition is as well as their true ROAS.
Not having exclusions is going to make your ROAS look great because it’s going to target people who are already engaged with your brand. So it’s going to inflate your ROAS and it’s going to look great. But is it really what’s best for you if your goal as a business is to scale? No. Do I think that you should not be targeting those people altogether? No, but they should be in a retargeting campaign that’s set up, structured properly, that’s not targeting consumers. That way you can very easily say,
It cost us $100 to acquire a new user and it cost us $30 to acquire somebody who’s engaged with the brand but never purchased before. Most people who have already purchased before, quite frankly, if you’re a smaller brand, you should really be relying on email to nurture that and to get them to repurchase. If you have a high repurchase rate or the product makes sense to where somebody is purchasing numerous times, you might be able to run a small retention campaign on Meta.
Kelsey O’Rourke (26:12.493)
The lack of audience exclusions is a big one and audience definitions was something else I mentioned. So within Meta, there’s the ability to define what a new consumer is, an engaged consumer is, as well as a existing consumer. If you don’t define those and you have all your targeting mixed together, you have no way of going into Meta’s platform to look at what the breakdown is. You can’t pull those breakdowns into reports, but you can look at them in platforms.
If your agency or your consultant is saying, Kelsey’s crazy, I’m not going to add exclusions, your ROAS is going to tank, fine. Let them not remove, let them not add exclusions, but at least have them add audience definitions. It’s not going to affect your performance, but it is going to give you a little bit more insight into how much of your dollars that you think is going to net new consumers is actually going to engage to our existing consumers and how inflated your ROAS actually looks. So my advice to brands always is
Add your audience definitions if you’re hesitant to add exclusions. And just look at what the breakdown is. It’ll take about 14 to 30 days before you’ll have enough data to really understand how much is being spent across those defined audiences because it’s not going to look back historically. It’s only ever going to show you those in a forward thinking mindset. So give it about a month after you the definitions and look at the breakdown. There are some cases where
all of the spend is still going to net new consumers and it hasn’t actually been going to the engaged audience even though there was a lack of exclusions. So it’s not 100 % of the time but I think that one’s really important. speaking of audiences, it rolls me into the fourth thing that I think a lot of brands are doing wrong is there’s a lot of audience overlap and a lot of this again comes from a lack of exclusions. not having…
you’re, you know, if you have a prospecting campaign and you want to target grandparents in one audience and then in the other one you’d like to target parents, there’s not really a good way to define who those people are in meta currently. They’re very similar, so you’re going to have a lot of audience overlap. So why isn’t it just a parent’s? Because ultimately a grandparent is still a parent, hence the name grand-arent.
Kelsey O’Rourke (28:32.865)
why not have all those together and target something totally different that is a totally different buyer persona to try to avoid audience overlap and also learn something about your brand? Like maybe this other buyer persona that you’re kind of curious about also works really well. So yeah, those are the like four, I think, big mistakes I see pretty often.
Greg Shuey (28:54.584)
Cool. So once you clean those things up, you should be in a lot better place. We’ve seen that with a lot of our clients over the last quarter or so. It’s wild how well that starts to work. It’s crazy.
Kelsey O’Rourke (28:58.703)
Thanks.
Kelsey O’Rourke (29:02.414)
I’m
Kelsey O’Rourke (29:13.839)
Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think it’s is also only relevant if you want to scale, which I think most businesses want. But if you’re perfectly happy with where you’re at and you don’t want to scale your business, then don’t rock the boat. Keep doing what you’re doing. But if you want to go, if you want to increase your revenue by 30 % year over year, you have to set rock the boat and set yourself up for success so that you can because ultimately
Greg Shuey (29:26.978)
Don’t rock the boat.
Greg Shuey (29:36.93)
Rock and roll.
Kelsey O’Rourke (29:42.553)
You got to spend money to make money, but you can’t spend more money into an audience that already knows who you are. You need to spend more money into people who don’t know who you are and make them aware of you. So that’s really the biggest difference in my opinion.
Greg Shuey (29:57.014)
Love it. Okay. So one of the things that I’ve heard from so many prospects this year is
Isn’t ad buying automated? Isn’t it automated these days? Like, what am I paying you for? So as meta ads become more automated and with AI, like we know that it’s just gonna continue to get a little bit more automated every single year. How can brands make sure that they still stand out and maintain control over their campaigns?
Kelsey O’Rourke (30:15.159)
Hmm.
Kelsey O’Rourke (30:20.313)
Hmm.
Kelsey O’Rourke (30:25.807)
Mm-hmm.
Kelsey O’Rourke (30:34.125)
Yeah. What automation is doing from a campaign perspective, just so the brands are aware. Like what does, I think people hear the word automated and they hear lazy agency. Like I think that’s where their brain goes, but that’s not what it means, right? What automation means is that there’s less and less control that we have on a targeting level as marketers. So I talked about this earlier in the podcast, but you used to, four years ago, be able to go into meta.
and create an audience and target the Depression Association of America, the Anxiety Association of America. And that would work really well for consumer healthcare brands who were in the mental health space because for obvious reasons, you can’t do that anymore. Are there still interest layers that you can target? Yes. And are we still using them? 100%. Are there other things that you can target like different demographic groups? Yes. 100%. Are we still using them? Yes. So
To say that it’s becoming all automated, think…
Kelsey O’Rourke (31:39.575)
is not, it lacks a little bit of understanding of the platform, which is totally fine, right? That’s why brands pay agencies, because they’re not experts on the space. What automated means is that the ability to target more hyper specifically is continuing to go away. So Meta is effectively forcing marketers to go more broad in their targeting, right? Because the algorithm is not as smart as it was five years ago, because it’s lost a lot of data points. And what going broad allows it to do is rely more on
creative. So when you go broad, there’s no layering outside of like maybe age range that you’re putting on there. So what really drives the algorithm is your creative assets. So having a really clear strategy as it relates to creative, including A-B tests so that you can clearly understand the reason why version A versus version B worked and then being able to iterate on that is really going to become crucial for brands that want to continue
to grow and scale through meta, which in a lot of cases, it’s a necessary evil for them. Like there isn’t really another advertising platform that’s like it. I mean, I know people want to say TikTok is there, but it’s not. Like the targeting is not as sophisticated as meta, even as meta is way more broad, targeting and TikTok is still not as sophisticated. And in addition to that, it’s a new platform. It’s only a few years old. So it’s very clunky. The tech is not great.
So I think having a really clear creative strategy is what’s going to help them stand out in the auction, right? So be more competitive on the engagement level as well as help further drive the algorithm the way they want it to go when they’re forced to do more broad targeting. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be using the targeting layers that already exist at all. We should still continue to test into them. And it’s about having a balance in your campaign structure, you know.
having enough spend to broad targeting versus having some spend going to your targeting layers that you’ve input or your agency or your consultant has input and then having a small percentage of your spend going to retargeting. So yeah, I think that’s what automated really means.
Greg Shuey (33:55.662)
That really means people.
Kelsey O’Rourke (33:57.807)
Yeah, exactly. It’s not a set it and forget it. Nothing about meta is a set it and forget it platform. So I think that a lot of brands sometimes mistake agencies who are using automated, automated targeting, which is just broad as like a way to say that like we’re setting it and forgetting it, but that’s absolutely not what’s happening. We’re just focusing more on your creative strategy. That’s all.
Greg Shuey (34:26.414)
Awesome, love it. Okay, so what role should meta ads play in a broader omni-channel strategy?
Kelsey O’Rourke (34:34.735)
Yeah, I love this question. I think I like to think about an omni-channel strategy for, say, your standard e-commerce brand. A lot of them are going to be on meta ads, they’re going to be on Google ads, they’re going to be focusing efforts on email slash SMS, and then organic social and SEO. The reason I bring all of these up is because I think it’s important to understand how I think about the omni strategy as a whole.
versus just what I think of meta ads, think under your direct umbrella is where your organic social and your SEO should live. This is really like you need to be putting effort into here, especially as a smaller brand so that you can have strong SEO and strong SEO is really going to take you very far. And as it relates to organic social, this is where you tell people about your new products. This is where you tell people that you’re doing a flash sale. Like this is where you push that direct messaging.
Email is again similar to me in my opinion. Like this is where you tell people about a new product. This is where you tell them about all of your promos, but also where you nurture the current community because these are retention, right? We want to retain users. We want to get them to purchase again and or we want them to convert a purchase, right? They’ve for some reason become a part of our community and maybe they haven’t purchased yet. So the goal is to engage and continue to nurture with email. And then when you think about meta and Google ads, like these
from my perspective and in my opinion should really be utilized to feed your net new consumer. So this is really like more top of funnel. Meta’s more specifically is even more top of funnel just because of the way the platform works. So when you think about Meta, you are effectively force feeding your brand’s concept onto somebody that didn’t care or even want to hear from you, right? So they weren’t looking for a bike.
They weren’t even thinking about a bike, but you are here to tell them about a bike and you have what we say 15. Yeah, and you need to tell them right now. And quite frankly, the way that thumb stop, the thumb stop rate metric works tells you that you have about three seconds to capture their attention. And if you don’t, they’ve moved on. So when you think about matter, because of the way the platform is built.
Greg Shuey (36:40.002)
Yeah. Right now.
Kelsey O’Rourke (36:59.959)
no one is looking for your product. these are, it just therefore lends itself to being a good place to prospect new consumers. So I think that’s really how people need to think about meta. You should still be having a portion of your budget go to retargeting campaigns to get people kind of over that hump who haven’t fully converted. So I’m not saying that that doesn’t need to exist, but that’s really why Evergreen products and campaigns, as well as your top selling products,
are and what should be your focus because that’s what’s going to get people to buy into your brand, right? Because you need them to buy the product, but they also kind of need to buy into the brand, especially if you’re something that people are buying on repeat. Whereas Google Ads, you still want to focus on net new consumers, but the platform is totally different in terms of consumer mindset, right? Somebody is looking for a bike. They literally searched bike near me, right? So.
feeding them ads about your bike products is significantly more relevant. So you’re typically going to have a much higher quality user and higher conversion rates on Google ads, but it’s going to be more expensive to get them to click and actually get to your site because they’re much more highly engaged. if you think about the strategy as a whole, meta is really like, we don’t know anything. It’s very top of funnel, but we still want to convert them. Whereas Google sits still top of funnel in my opinion, but a little bit lower in that funnel.
kind of rounds out that full omnichannel strategy.
Greg Shuey (38:30.83)
Got it, love it. Okay, last question for you. We’re kinda coming up on time here. Creative aside, if you could give e-commerce brands one key piece of advice for their meta ads as they head into 2025, what would it be?
Kelsey O’Rourke (38:40.271)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (38:52.462)
Your answer was going to be creative. It was going to be you, T.
Kelsey O’Rourke (38:54.413)
No, no, no, no. I actually think there’s more other things that are important. I think if I could give brands one key piece of advice for their meta-ad strategy, it would be to look at your campaign structure and look at your audience targeting and the way that it’s set up. Really review it and understand it. And if your agency or your consultant isn’t explaining it to you, ask them to. Because ultimately, I’m of the belief that
And I think some clients like this, some clients are kind of like, okay, I’m bored. But I’m of the belief that if I provide a little bit of education as to why I’m doing something a certain way, even if it’s a little bit too technical for that founder or that director of growth that I’m speaking to, they’re going to understand it better and then therefore instill more confidence in the person that’s running their ads. So if I was an e-commerce brand founder, I would say
Can you explain to me like, what is our campaign structure? How much are we spending on prospecting versus retargeting? And just at a high level, who are we targeting on a prospecting side? Having that information and understanding that is going to be able to give that founder the agency that they need to say, actually, I think it would be interesting to target this group of people. Why haven’t we tested that before and asked those questions? But until you know those things, you can’t.
there’s not really a good piece of advice I can give you, right? Because you need to understand. I have talked to countless founders who just don’t know those things because they rely so much on their agency or their consultant, or even sometimes internal person, whoever’s running it from the inside. Sometimes it’s just they’re acting in a silo. I think that that’s one piece of advice that will then run into this domino effect of, okay, well, do we have the proper exclusions? Are we using this
this platform for what it should be used for, which is new consumers. then what is our creative strategy for this parent audience that we’re testing? Like, are we showing them ads that make sense for parents who would want to buy a bike for their kid? Like, it’ll kind of have a domino effect from there.
Greg Shuey (41:04.366)
I like it. Fantastic. Cool. Well, thank you so much. I think we’ve learned a lot today. Yeah, hopefully. Cool, cool. So yeah, if you’ve listened to this, I hope that you have been able to pull out a couple of nuggets that will help you with your 2025 planning. We’ve learned a lot and I hope that you can take that.
Kelsey O’Rourke (41:12.729)
Yeah, hopefully.
Greg Shuey (41:32.398)
take massive action in 2025 and grow your business 20 to 30 % or more, right? That’s the goal. That’s the goal. All right. Yes. Thank you, Kelsey, again. And thank you, everyone, for joining.
Kelsey O’Rourke (41:38.765)
What? Amazing.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
