Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond ecommerce podcast, Greg Shuey hosts Andrew and Victor from AdCrunch, discussing their high-volume ad copy and creative testing strategy for scaling brands on the Meta platform. They highlight the importance of knowing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and leveraging a data-driven approach to optimize ad performance. They share insights into their framework called the Creative Search Protocol (CSP), emphasizing strategic and intentional high-volume testing. The conversation covers the nuances of different creative types, the significance of hook and hold rates, and the need for brands to adapt their strategies based on evolving user experiences and platform changes. Andrew and Victor also provide practical tips on managing ad variations and optimizing performance through effective testing and offer strategies.
Key Takeaways
- Creative Search Protocol (CSP): AdCrunch’s framework for high-volume ad copy and creative testing is called CSP, focusing on strategic and intentional testing to learn faster and amplify successful creatives.
- Importance of ICP: Understanding and defining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is crucial for creating effective ad copy and creative that resonates with the target audience.
- Hook and Hold Rates: Measuring and optimizing hook rates (initial attention) and hold rates (sustained attention) are essential for effective ad performance on the Meta platform.
- Offer Strategies: Successful scaling often involves creating compelling offers, such as threshold offers and free gifts, which can significantly boost conversion rates and overall performance.
- Ad Organization and Testing: Maintaining a structured approach with clear naming conventions and levels for different stages of ad testing helps manage high-volume testing efficiently. Using tools like Triple Whale and Motion can aid in this process, but the ad account itself often provides sufficient data for effective analysis.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Victor Vo LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorvo/
Andrew DiLullo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-dilullo-481222bb/
Ad Crunch: https://www.adcrunchdigital.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey: 0:27
Hey everyone welcome to the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast. I hope everyone’s absolutely crushing it today, hope everyone got up early, knocked out their to-do list and is moving their businesses forward. So today I have a couple of rock stars here with me. I’ve got Andrew and I’ve got Victor from an agency called Ad Crunch. They are the co-founders of their agency and we’ll give them a few minutes to introduce themselves here in just a minute.
Greg Shuey: 1:02
Today I’m really excited about our discussion. We are going to be diving into their strategy of high volume ad copy and creative testing for scaling brands on the meta platform. So when I talk to brands, right like I have two ends of the spectrum. I have the ones that want to do high volume and then I have the ones that want to do, like, low volume, very beautiful, very on brand creative, and so you know it’s going to be fun to be able to talk about high volume, because I don’t get to do that very often.
Greg Shuey: 1:37
And, as we’ve talked about before on the podcast, you know media buying in general is becoming more automated by the day, and so what brands truly need is an individual or they need an agency like AdCrunch to come in and really help them on the creative strategy side and take some time to really deeply understand their customers and then can tell that story through creative and copy to get people to take action. So we’re going to talk about how to do that at scale. Andrew Victor, thank you so much for being with us today.
Victor Vo: 2:15
Absolutely Excited to be here, Greg.
Greg Shuey: 2:18
It’s going to be awesome. So, before we jump into our questions that we have, would each of you just take a few minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story. Share about how you’ve gotten to where you are today, what led you to start the agency, why Meta, and just kind of help us understand that story.
Andrew DiLullo: 2:41
Yeah, definitely I can go ahead and go first here. Help us understand that story. Yeah, definitely, I can go ahead and go first here. So I kind of got into running ads in a roundabout way.
Andrew DiLullo: 2:53
I have a degree in audio production, so I was like mixing, mastering bands in college and making music and I was trying to figure out like that was. It was really hard to make money doing that, so I was trying to figure out what else I could do. So I bought a couple of SoundCloud and Spotify accounts and I was like reposting people’s stuff on them to get them plays. And then I started running ads for artists and very quickly figured out that businesses would pay you a lot more money, uh, to run their ads and and that was kind of that. So, um, I, um, I’ve been doing it ever since and I, I love it. I think my goal I we’re going to own a uh like a holding company one day. So this is right. The precursor to that like this is like hey, this is our playground, right, we’re going to figure out how ready you know, take the take the leap into actually like owning something or having, you know, partial ownership in businesses. Sure.
Greg Shuey: 3:48
Cool, awesome, victor. How about you?
Victor Vo: 3:51
Yeah, so for me, my background I think, wow, it’s crazy to say that I’ve been in marketing in the tech space for over a decade now started out in the startup scene in Austin.
Victor Vo: 4:07
For over a decade now Started out in the startup scene in Austin, texas, and one thing that I quickly learned about myself is that I’m really addicted to results, and so that’s why paid media seems to be my sweet spot.
Victor Vo: 4:18
But I’ve been in multiple different ventures, especially specializing in e-commerce and seeing how everything moves together, how traffic is affected and how you grow companies from you know actually something very simple that we’ll touch base on today. But really I got so into that and I went from a background of conversion rate optimization to marketing operations and then I just fell in love with ads, because that’s where I sit best, and something we’ll talk about today is the ad creative process that helps us to scale, to bring the right traffic into the businesses and stuff like that. My background I mean I’m a creative through and through, right. I love chaos, but I also love to turn that chaos into order. So that’s kind of the whole thing that got me real excited about teaming up with Andrew, because Andrew and I I mean we never set out to actually start an agency.
Greg Shuey: 5:21
We set out I think most people don’t. They’re accidental business owners, right.
Victor Vo: 5:27
Yeah. And so Andrew and I just we’ve scaled so many companies I think, andrew, we’ve spent over $100 million and then generated $400 million in the past several years and we thought, let’s do this. Let’s do this, especially now that we know the types of people we want to work with. The people we work with are growth-minded, they’re smart, but they’re also fearless. And so we’re able to come in and say, hey, we’re basically former C-suite and we’re going to be your growth partners, because both Andrew and I have that obsession. And so he and I decided hey, you want to just go ahead and go all in. I said, yeah, I’ve always loved working with Andrew. I’m like super smart when it comes to data. I mean, he works faster than probably my smartphone and all the different apps and stuff. Like I’ll say, you know answers and forecasts and stuff like that, and he has killer strategies. And then it just coupled with my love for you know content and creative and we’re able to scale you know health and wellness and beauty brands with this system yeah, that’s awesome.
Greg Shuey: 6:33
How’d you guys meet?
Andrew DiLullo: 6:34
no. So I went through this digital marketing apprenticeship program, um, and victor was one of the one of the like coaches, like teachers in the program, and so he was like helping running like operations person and so um. We just kind of like stayed connected and I would see him at like this coffee shop. You know, because we live very close to each other, I’d be, like hey, victor, how’s it going? We’re just kind of like talk about marketing and stuff, so yeah, that’s cool.
Greg Shuey: 7:01
And then one thing led to another and you’re accidental business owners. That’s cool. And then one thing led to another and you’re accidental business owners I’m gonna replace the word.
Victor Vo: 7:10
But yeah, absolutely no. So here we are I love it.
Greg Shuey: 7:14
I love it. Well, you guys ready to jump in? Let’s go cool, all right, uh. So, victor’m actually going to direct this one to you, so can you take some time just kind of preface our whole discussion and help us understand, kind of high level, what the framework is that you use for high volume ad copy and creative testing.
Victor Vo: 7:37
Absolutely, Greg. So really, the framework, we’re calling it the creative search protocol, Really the framework we’re calling it the Creative Search Protocol, right CSP, and the idea here is that you do high volume testing so that you can learn faster, and then you amplify that. But it’s important to not mistake that for wasting money and throwing a whole bunch of tests out there just to meet a quota. It’s actually more strategic and intentional it’s actually more strategic and intentional.
Victor Vo: 8:03
So the idea is, when people purchase right, they go through different stages in the buyer life cycle and so you can have somebody that already knows about your solution that you propose right to a problem that’s in the market.
Victor Vo: 8:21
However, they might be in different stages, they might have already heard about your product or they don’t even know about your product and that’s considered still a solution aware person, right. And so the first step always in this framework for it to really work is you have to know your ICP or your ideal customer profile and doing the work to get that. I can touch base on some of those points in this if it’s helpful for the listeners, but it starts from there. From there that becomes your hub, your foundation, and then all of your creatives, all of your angles and your text overlays and all the things you’ll test come from that, because, basically, you’re trying to nail on all their pain points, to figure out which pain point hurts the most, that you can affect the most. That’s really the core of it, and you have high volume because there are nuances in those pain points and you need to be able to nail that down and then be able to get the data that you need in order to then amplify that.
Greg Shuey: 9:24
Yeah, I love that you touch on the ICP, like that’s one of the things that is becoming more important by the day, right? It’s like two years ago you didn’t really hear a lot of people talk about ICP. It was just like, hey, get my ads up, right, here’s my money, here’s my creative, get my ads up. And I still have those conversations today. And I’m just like here’s my creative, get my ads up. And I still have those conversations today. And I’m just like time out, time out. People like we have to really dig in and do a little bit of customer research and uncover those pain points and problems and figure out how they talk and how they describe those things so you can then reverse engineer and figure out how to talk to them and really get in complete alignment yeah, I was gonna say we don’t even like, and I guess we use ICP as like a term right.
Andrew DiLullo: 10:08
It’s almost an IPP like, ideal, like like, or sorry, ideal or ice, the ideal customer problem. So I guess this would be ICP because like we like generally speaking, like I like we write hooks headlines make speaking like I, like we write hooks, headlines make creative based off of like problems. So like we’re more looking at like how can we present this problem to a person in like a myriad of ways.
Greg Shuey: 10:33
And that’s where the volume comes in.
Andrew DiLullo: 10:35
It’s like okay, we have one problem. Now let’s write it in like five, let’s write it five to 10 different ways, let’s create five to 10 different offers around it. And right, because people experience the same problem even if they’re different. You know ages, different, you know demographics, different geographical locations. It’s more of like the ideal customer, like problem.
Greg Shuey: 10:58
So, yeah, I like that. Ideal customer problem. There you go. Have you have you guys trademarked that? I don’t know that. I’ve ever heard that before. Yeah, you guys need to trademark that and just off the heck out of your website. Ideal customer problem. I love it. All right, andrew, so this next question is for you. So now that we’ve really kind of understood what that framework is, what are the key elements that make ad copy and creative effective?
Andrew DiLullo: 11:29
on meta I think for and it depends if it’s B2C or B2B like B2B, I see more like problem solution stuff, like straight problem solution work Like are you struggling with this? Like you know, try this instead, like that’s really effective in b2b. But when it comes to b2c this is kind of what I was saying earlier we’re making all these iterations of one benefit copy. So let’s just say, like your benefit copy is like you know, I’m gonna use hair extensions as an example, because we work with a lot of, you know, beauty brands. Um, but, like you, these hair extensions make you look beautiful, right?
Andrew DiLullo: 12:05
You can reframe that as, like, long hair equals self care, or like or like POV. You know, I finally felt beautiful after using these extensions or you can kind of reframe it in a bunch of ways and one of those ways is going to work the best with your customer and that’s what you’re trying to figure out. So we have a hook sheet and I can give that. We just we give it away for free. So I can give that to you, Greg, and I don’t know.
Greg Shuey: 12:30
Heck yeah, let’s link that up in the show note It’ll help you.
Andrew DiLullo: 12:34
It’s for the beauty industry. But what you want to do to make it for your industry is go on Tik TOK and, you know, start to research your product on TikTok and see the organic hooks that are working really well. You don’t always look at like video views, because there are a lot of people with a lot of followers that have crappy hooks, right, but they get a lot of views because they have a lot of followers. So we look at okay, let’s have around like 5000 or more views, cool, and then what are hooks that we like? What is the framework of that hook?
Andrew DiLullo: 13:08
So for beauty, we identified obviously Get Ready With Me POV like equals headlines. We call them nightmare headlines, which is a problem solution. So it’s like my $5,000 makeup nightmare is over. I paid $5,000 for this gal to do my makeup for a wedding and you know it didn’t go well. Now I just use, you know, elf makeup, right, it’s that simple. So we’re just reframing problem solution over and over again and you could think of it like different fonts, almost so. Right, it’s just, it’s just tweaked slightly.
Greg Shuey: 13:42
So interesting victor any thoughts there?
Victor Vo: 13:46
yeah, I think, a couple things to call out. I mean, what andrew’s talking about, we identify and call it native creatives, right. So it’s important to know the three different types of creatives that a brand would work with. So you have your native creatives, you have your brand native and you have your brand right. And then are the creatives, the videos that just look polished. They would go great, even on a television commercial, but native looks like somebody just posted something that blends in with the account, right, and those perform really well. And so, as you’re looking for these hooks and these patterns in what’s already organic, those are natives. And actually that’s my favorite way to test first, because then you’re able to really blend in and then you’ll be able to sell. Now there are use cases right where native is great, especially for, I would say, a colder audience right, but warmer and they’re ready to buy. I mean brand would be great because it’s already a qualifier right.
Victor Vo: 14:52
So, andrew and I like to think about our ad creatives as actually our salespeople and when you finally nail, you know the right sales message and stuff. The reason why we go with iterations and optimizations is because we’re going to see how we can multiply and expand that one salesperson into as many as we can and squeeze all the revenue we can from that salesperson, and then we want to be able to clone that salesperson and basically continue the cycle, because, at the end of the day, people love novelty, right? That’s why you you know I’m I’m doing a whole research on my myself and just people in general right now, like thinking about dopamine and I’m reading a book called Dopamine Nation by Dr Anna Lemke and you know, along with a whole bunch of other readings. But the thing here is that people will gravitate toward novelty. That’s why, you know, you get that first hit, but you want to be able to get something similar but better. And so your mind tells itself to basically save that experience and we’re going to do this again. And then it lumps any other similar experience into that, and so we’re like, okay, well, this person might have seen this ad, and then we change a hook or something.
Victor Vo: 16:11
That’s why it works, because of that novelty, which is also why Andrew and I kind of go against saying just do a whole bunch of new angles and creatives all the time. It’s like that’s a big waste of money. It introduces chaos into the account and your business in general, right. So that’s why we would do that Now, when you do the net new creative, you would do that on maybe like a five or 10% spend, and it has to be, you know, a data driven decision which we can dive in a little bit deeper. But that’s what I would add into some of the research and stuff that Andrew has just mentioned.
Greg Shuey: 16:48
Got it Okay, cool. I think that kind of ties back into our next question is how do you prioritize which ad copy and creative variations to test? First, victor, I’m going to throw that one to you.
Victor Vo: 17:00
Yeah. So we look for low hanging fruit and missed opportunities. Okay. So again, it has to be data-driven, it’s not just guess. And, by the way, if you’re listening and you have challenges with basically saying, oh, I’m not a creative person or I can’t do this, it’s like no, get over that. You do have this. It’s like get over it. I hope that sounds encouraging. By the way, that helps a lot, but at the end of the day, you get the data and stuff and it’ll really help you. And what data am I talking about? A data point includes the things that Andrew already mentioned. You know, go look at what’s trending, right? Maybe you look at your own ad account ads and then you look at the stuff that’s trending out there and you look at your competition, find the patterns, because the more you notice those patterns, that’s how you prioritize. For example, if we’re doing hair extension ads, I go and I watch a bunch of hair extension videos, right?
Victor Vo: 18:00
and I find all, and I note the patterns that I keep seeing my favorite place to go is actually the comment section, because that’s where potential buyers and users actually give you the words that you’re going to use for your hooks. For example, whenever Andrew said a while ago watch hair extensions that make you beautiful. Right, that’s the message. Once you adapt it to what the people are already saying on platform, it translates to why do these hair extensions eat? Right, because that’s a native phrase and you wouldn’t know that. Or, yes, queen, yo hair 80, like eight, with a whole bunch of E’s, and that’s great, right? So when you start getting those angles, you’re like, hey, I think this is something that we should test first, because it seems like a lot of people are complaining about it. For example, hair extensions that blend naturally, right, they?
Victor Vo: 18:56
want it to blend. People complain a lot about blending. Another thing is people complain about hair extensions lasting long. They use a word called matting where, like, the hair is matted and it just looks destroyed, right? So we’re like, ok, these are the angles we want to hit, versus something more like, you know, dealing with, you know, bald spots, right, because those that are already warm and they’re already using hair extensions or aware of hair extensions are easier to sell to than those that don’t even know that that’s a solution. They’re just at the place where they just probably discovered that they have a suspicious bald spot and they’re thinking, well, what are my solutions? Hair grows, shampoos, rosemary oil, serums, diets and stuff. They’re going to be too hard to convince. So the answer to your question, greg, is which part of which ICP is easier to sell to based on what you know about that. Prioritize those as low hanging fruit and then go up from there as you stack cash from the performance that you’re able to now invest in the colder audiences toward the top.
Greg Shuey: 20:08
Got it All right, sweet. So, andrew, I’ve got one for you. As you’re scaling copy creative, do you have a platform or a tool that you recommend for managing all of this? Because that seems messy and that seems chaotic to me. How do you guys do that?
Andrew DiLullo: 20:29
yeah, we well, we use triple whale and motion some, but honestly, just the ad account is kind of it’s fine, like well, we use the ad account a lot more than anything. Um, emotion if it’s really big. But you know, if you’re, if you’re only, I mean I know this it sounds like a, but you know, if you’re, if you’re only, I mean I know this it sounds like a lot. But 40 to like 60 ads, if you’re only testing 40 to 60 ads a month, like that’s pretty easy to like look at in about five minutes and just see what’s going on. Um, I think we’ll have, like we’ll have sheets or document like you know, sheet with like old running ads if we want to iterate off of them later, um, but a lot of it’s a lot of.
Andrew DiLullo: 21:13
It’s like a lot of the accounts we get and I would assume most of you have. Even if you’re doing 40 to 60 iterations of ads a month, it’s really not enough to have some kind of special reporting tool. I used to work for this company. It’s called Offerscom. They own RetailMeNot and I was managing 100, I think at one point it was like 120 Google ad accounts and they had a crazy reporting tool. I was just fixing stuff all day.
Andrew DiLullo: 21:46
It would just say like hey, alert, there’s a click-through rate drop in this ad account. Go, fix it. Basically, unless you’re at that kind of scale, which most of us are not, there’s really not a need to get a different tool. The ad account has link click-through rate in it, which is important. Hook rate, conversion rate, hold rate 25. Click through rate in it, which is important. Hook rate, conversion rate, hold rate 25%. View rate you know you can get. You know add to cart rate, add to cart cost per add to cart. I mean that account has all that stuff in there. So I wouldn’t recommend spending money on a super fancy tool unless it’s unless it’s high stakes, yeah, so fancy tool, unless it’s unless it’s high stakes.
Victor Vo: 22:33
Yeah, so all right, I actually have a tip for that.
Victor Vo: 22:34
So you know, greg, you’re kind of talking about organization, I think, having a great structure and a naming convention is how we we keep inside the ad account yes got it, so we would have, you know, each of the ads have their own name and and, by the way, the naming convention and structure doesn’t have to be crazy complex. You just want to be able to assign a variable to whatever variable you’re going for. So all of our new creatives actually have, you know, an ID name. That’s like, you know, 2005, 2006, 2007. So that’s like in our system. Hey, let’s talk about Creative 2007, version two, right? Version two is a different hook. Version three is a different hook. So we keep it organized that way on the sheet and then in the ad account itself. And also Andrew’s ad structure that he always puts us on, which I love and I’ve adopted, is he does this, you know, level system that you know. Maybe, andrew, you can share a little bit more about that but.
Victor Vo: 23:34
I find it to be one of the most intuitive ways to keep things organized, and I’ve done many different structures through my career, but I finally adopted Andrew’s and it wasn’t even biased because he’s my business partner. It’s just really intuitive.
Andrew DiLullo: 23:48
Also. This is really important. So we do a lot of high volume testing with hooks. We don’t always run them and run it in a conversion campaign, and I’m just I’m saying this to preface, like what our naming convention is, because this is, this is the first part of it.
Andrew DiLullo: 24:04
We run a link through a link click campaign to get click-through rate. Initially we do that with 40 hooks and we do that because it’s much cheaper. So instead of spending four grand at a hundred dollars an ad for 40 hooks right, it takes, you know you want to spend a hundred dollars to verify it we’ll run 40 hooks in a link click campaign. We’ll spend about five dollars an ad, right. So you’re looking at like, at like 200 bucks, right, it’s not that much. And then we’ll sort them by link click-through rate and we’ll take the top quartile and then move those to a conversion rate campaign. So that’s L1 is a link link click-through rate campaign or hook testing campaign. L2 is the conversion campaign and so that’s just the creative testing campaign. That’s where we do all of our creative testing. And then l3 is going to be audience testing campaign. So that’s when like, okay, we have some winners, let’s bump the budgets and test, you know, some audiences. Honestly, we don’t really test audiences a ton anymore. It’s just not. It’s just not as worth it now. It’s expensive, yeah.
Andrew DiLullo: 25:14
And then L4 is going to be our scaling campaign. So usually that’s cost caps. Right now we’re doing a lot of cost caps and then still just lowest cost conversion. That’s always been working. And then L5 is retargeting. So, purchasers, it’s usually a catalog, it’s really just a catalog campaign. So there’s five levels to it. It’s pretty straightforward. And then the naming convention is literally one zero, zero, one dash, v, one which is our hook dash. And then you would have like we just do a big a for the headline and then we do a little a for the hook, and we have we just have those four variables, because those are the only four things we really want to know in the on the ad. So which one of those is working?
Greg Shuey: 26:09
Interesting. That’s cool. That’s a great way to organize it and build it out. Thank you for sharing that, andrew. Like what common mistakes do you see brands make when they are trying to test ad copy and creative, and what can they do to avoid those?
Andrew DiLullo: 26:27
Yeah, so I think you mentioned at the beginning of this video, greg, is like trying to be on brand all the time. Meta is your like that meta is not your brand, that’s your, it’s your playground. Spend $5 to figure out if a hook is working or not.
Andrew DiLullo: 26:44
People think of a brand, right, it’s like you know, it’s kind of like they kind of think of it like money. It’s like they’re always worried about. Like you know, they’re very loss minded with brand where it’s like no, be like, be like, abundance minded. Right, it’s like you can add to your brand and the more you add, the more your brand will. I’m not saying you should, just, you know, always add to your brand, but you can add pieces that are extremely valuable to your brand that you won’t know about until you test them, right, and so, yeah, your, your brand should be an amalgamation of your customers’ voices, and if you’re not testing, like the language in which your customers are speaking to you, you don’t have like a brand, right, it’s like the look, the feel, the voice, all of those things. And so I think that’s the biggest. I think that’s a big mistake people make is trying to be, so narrow minded about it.
Andrew DiLullo: 27:44
And it’s different if you’re Coca-Cola. This is what I always. We work with brands who are like, oh, I’m a luxury brand. I’m like like I’m sorry you advertising at f1, like, no, like you’re not a luxury brand, um, stop thinking you sell an expensive product but you’re not a luxury brand, um. And so figuring out like you know, I think understanding that and, like you know, trying to figure out what your brand is through testing is a much more effective way than just saying, like I can rely on my intuition because it’s got me, you know, this far yeah, and then I told you luxury brands out there very few exactly very few and most of them aren’t hiring agencies no, not at
Andrew DiLullo: 28:24
all oh man I.
Victor Vo: 28:27
I got something to add there, too, because we talk about brand and testing, right. What are you looking for? Yes, the voices and the customer experience, what they say about you on the platforms, but the biggest indicator is if they’re buying from you. There’s no vote for your company. That’s higher than the dollar, they’re willing to open their wallet and say I’m buying it.
Victor Vo: 28:49
That’s the loudest voice rather than you surveying and doing all this stuff, with them saying, okay, I think your brand is great, doesn’t matter, it’s what they’re doing with their money. And if they buy from you, then they also give you the right customer reviews and stuff. That’s your new goldmine. You’re like oh, we are a premium brand that you makes it affordable for people to have premium products by doing X, y, z, like those things are fine.
Greg Shuey: 29:15
Yeah, all right, that’s great. That’s great insight. You know, I don’t really care which one of you takes this one, I’ll let you rock paper scissors over it, but do you have a case study that you can share with us about how high volume testing significantly improved a brand’s performance?
Andrew DiLullo: 29:35
Oh, yeah, so that was actually another thing. You’re asking mistakes that we see people make is not testing enough and not being fast enough at testing. Money loves speed and if you you can’t test fast enough, you’ll never make the money that you want to. Um. And so, yeah, case study, um, the biggest brand we worked with. We took them from about 25 million to 42 million, so it’s about 17 million in one year. Um, and that was a combination of three things. It was offers Ads. Ads are one piece of the puzzle. That’s another mistake. People think they can run a business on ads. It’s like right, good luck, yeah, you got to have a good offer, a good landing page and good ads. Cause meta is looking at your conversion and good, good spend too. Cause meta is looking at a couple of things. It’s looking at your conversion rate um, you know your ad, your copy the video, your mate. Um, you know your ad, your copy the video, how well it’s received. Um, and then your spend. So premium ads, premium spend, premium landing page your that’s how you went.
Andrew DiLullo: 30:36
Yeah, um, but anyway. So that brand, a lot of a lot of the offer we ran is literally just a threshold offer and a lot of people are doing this byob, which is a variation of that. It’s build your own bundle. So they’ll just say pick two or three products from our store, get you know 30 off, or you know, add you know they’ll actually create a page dedicated to that.
Andrew DiLullo: 31:01
But what we did was a little more, I guess, primitive, where we would say you know, hey, get 10% off site wide, and that’s important because you want anybody to come to your site to get something, because they’ll just leave otherwise. And then their AOV was about $230. So we put it I believe it was like 275. It was just right above their AOV. Or get you know 20% off, plus this free item, plus a free item above 275. And that worked extremely, extremely well. We gave a pretty high value item Like.
Andrew DiLullo: 31:40
Comparatively, we actually increased the item’s cost to make it look like it was even more valuable. We also increased their. Before we did all this, we increased their prices by, I think it was about like anywhere from five to ten percent, so they weren’t really losing out on that much margin and then we started to implement a threshold offer. Um, we had ads with the offer on it, you know, retargeting people who visited the site. We were also, you know, running this iterative testing process and then also optimizing the landing page. It was a. They had a lot of variations of the same product.
Andrew DiLullo: 32:16
So we’re making it easier for people to find the product they wanted. You know, we were also and the last thing we did was a was a quiz too, and that was pretty, pretty helpful. So, too, and that was pretty, pretty helpful. So, um, nice, yeah, I would. If you’re not running an offer, I would run an offer. I would figure out what offer works for your brand, because that’s like more than ads.
Andrew DiLullo: 32:37
In this process, we see offers grow and if you don’t know what an offer is, it’s read 100 million or 100 million dollar offers by alex harmosi. It’s basically just, it’s like a, it’s a more sophisticated, it’s a more sophisticated way to discount. Your product is basically what an offer is. So, yeah, um and so, but yeah, that that was kind of the strategy there. Um, the offer drove a lot of that. We were really able to scale post offer because they were the only one in their space that was actually giving a free gift with their product. Everybody else was like get $15 off, get this off, but they were giving a $100 perceived value gift. It only cost the company about $15, but it was a $100 perceived value gift with a purchase.
Greg Shuey: 33:24
Interesting. Wow, that’s a good offer. Well, victor, this one’s for you, okay, and we’ve talked a little bit about it already. Right, but how do you analyze the results and hook tests to grab attention, because that’s the key.
Victor Vo: 34:00
That’s what you really want to do first. You can’t sell somebody unless you’ve earned the right to sell them first by grabbing their attention, holding it and then continuing. So that’s how it works. That’s why you hear a lot, probably, of people talking about hook testing and hook rates and hold rates. So let’s just use that example.
Victor Vo: 34:20
Let’s say that the context that we have here is we’re trying to hook more people into staying to watch the video or what I talked about earlier, our salesperson, to hear the salesperson talk. Because if we know that an ad is generating conversions and it’s getting a great click-through rate, logically, if you fill more of the top funnel, you get more people to come by. Then you’re going to get more people to your site, because it’s a math game and it’s a journey funnel game. So if you’re doing that, what we look at our metrics like hook rate, old rate, we look at link click through rates and then if there are no purchases in your test so far and usually you give it about three days at least before you start looking at data on a game.
Victor Vo: 35:13
And then you look at software metrics from purchase right, if it’s not purchase, it would be add to carts, right, yeah, landing page views.
Victor Vo: 35:22
So that those are the metrics that you’re looking at. But right off the bat, usually what I look at is actually, you can’t look at it in isolation, it all has to tell the story together. And so from there you’re like, okay, did the hook rate improve? Right, with the new hook? You added a new text hook and you’re like the whole point of this is to grab attention and it didn’t improve, right. But then you might get some scenarios where it didn’t improve but the purchase rate increased, right. So then you have to kind of dig deeper into that and say why did that increase? Like, what, what was fully different about it? Maybe the hook that you threw on there, uh, didn’t grab attention, but the message was different and it qualified your people in a different, it pulled in the right people. So you’re looking at those uh together to make a decision. So so that’s more of a hook analysis.
Victor Vo: 36:18
Now, if you are trying to increase conversion rate right from your ad to your site, it’s okay to actually have, you know, less performing or lower hook rates and stuff like that right off the bat, and this is one example that we just actually had. We freaking, I think the ROAS that we looked at yesterday was about seven or eight. I’m in the conversion rate jumped. I don’t have the full metrics in front of me, but it was a great performance push and we, what we did was we turned this ad into a brand native ads. We combined and then we combined native. So all I did was we create a new hook at the beginning, like before afters, and then we then have that transition into the winning organic native video and then CTA at the end. So less people came through, but more qualified people came through. So we’ll purchase more.
Victor Vo: 37:11
It just depends on the context of what you’re trying to do. I’ll break it down. If your goal is to grab attention, then you’re trying to do. I’ll break it down. If your goal is to grab attention, then you’re trying to optimize the hook rate. If your goal is to hold attention because you have a good hook rate but your hold rate is lower, then I would do something like a tag. A tag is just another hook. It’s like one hook plus a hook, back to back. It’s very similar to Joseph Sugarman’s concept of copywriting. He’s one of the best copywriters of all time. I love his work. But he says that the purpose of the first line, or the headline, is actually not to sell you, it’s to get you to read the second line. The second line’s job is to get you to read the third line, third line, fourth line, all the way down. I take the same methodology and we do that with our creators.
Greg Shuey: 37:59
Cool, I like that. That’s great. So, wrapping up, the last question that I like to ask all of our guests, and I’m going to let each of you chime in on this. I don’t care which order you go in, but where do you see meta ads going in the next 12 months? What does that look like? Do you have any predictions for the last half of this year and going into 2025?
Andrew DiLullo: 38:25
one.
Andrew DiLullo: 38:25
I hope it gets better because it’s an absolute like crap show right now um, I don’t see it getting I don’t see it getting any worse um, yeah, I don’t know, I think, I think, I, I I don’t even know if this is 12 months, but some, at some point, they’ll really figure out every this could happen in like you know years, but they’ll really figure out how to integrate ai into their ads platform, um, and I think that that will be a whole another that will look totally different than yeah, but they’re playing with it. You know they’re playing with it right now.
Andrew DiLullo: 39:01
You see it, when you write, try and write texts, it’s like use this suggested text or this or that, um, but the 12 months, I, I, I see it getting better after the election, hopefully, and then it’s crossed, yeah, hopefully, and then crossed, yeah, and then um, um, yeah, I don’t, I don’t like I it’s kind of funny. They always try and rely on data and automated learning, but it always go back. It always goes back to do you know how to test, right, yeah, you know how to isolate things and test effectively. And then, what frameworks are you using? So I, you know Meta’s changed. They’ve tried to do DCA kind of worked. It kind of didn’t work right, this is like over the last 10 years They’ve tried to do DCA, they’ve tried to do CBO, they’ve tried to do Advantage Plus Shopping.
Andrew DiLullo: 39:48
I mean, we’re still, you know, bidding with cost cap and we’re still using lowest cost conversion. I mean it doesn’t seem like they can really get out of that. You know, right, hopefully they can get better data to. And you know, advantage, advantage plus works pretty well, but it’s doing a lot of retargeting. Yeah, so, but I actually don’t think a lot’s going to change. I don’t think it. I mean a lot has changed but really it gets. It goes back to the, the fundamentals every time over. You know DCA worked out there, but while there for a while, you know, advantage Plus seemed like it worked better when it came out. I feel like it’s gotten worse the last couple of months. But yeah, it’s kind of going back to the basic. Do you know how to bid, do you know how to and do you know how to iterate and test within frameworks?
Greg Shuey: 40:36
So yeah, I like that.
Victor Vo: 40:38
Cool, victor. So, in my opinion, I think we have to look at pay traffic as a whole right, because they play off of each other. A lot of the formats now, especially in Instagram and other meta products, are kind of looking at TikTok right, so you have TikTok, you have even YouTube, has YouTube Shorts, right? So they play off of each other, and so it’s important in terms of a user experience, which is very important too, because, as advertisers, I talked about ICP at the very beginning, so you have to really know your people, you have to know the experience that they’re going to go through. That’s going to play off of each other. Everything that Andrew has said is valid, especially as an ad buyer right, but on the front of the user experience and how to actually continue to optimize and connect with those users through advertising is going to play as a whole ecosystem. It’s hard to tell exactly where it’s going to go with how fast AI is growing. There’s a word or law that talks about how technology actually advances exponentially, but that word is not coming to mind.
Andrew DiLullo: 41:48
Is it Moore’s Law?
Victor Vo: 41:50
What’s that? Is that Moore’s Law?
Andrew DiLullo: 41:51
Moore’s Law yeah.
Victor Vo: 41:53
Okay, so that’s probably it, right. So it’s like you don’t know. It just keeps going and getting better and better. So the way I look at it is well, better is a subjective word. It keeps getting more advanced, right, yeah? So if you’re asking the question like, hey, what should we anticipate as a brand owner, I would say well, anticipate the user experience changing. Also, the way that you advertise change. However, it’s important for any business owner that wants to succeed, and this is something that I’ve learned over time with a lot of mentors and also thinking it’s like those that really succeed through time. They go for what never changes. They look at okay, all these things are changing. You can be an innovator and grab after every new change that is out there. But the ones and the thing is like there’s a, it’s a boom, and after that you’re back to square one, but the ones that really sustain a business and just keep succeeding, they look at the market and the landscape and they say, hey, what will never change, got it.
Victor Vo: 43:01
The way we see that is advertising, sales, messaging, basically how to sell with words, visuals, whatever. At the core of it. That doesn’t change. The delivery changes, but the message doesn’t change. So that’s why Andrew and I can also work cross platforms. You know TikTok Pinterest, google because that’s the idea.
Victor Vo: 43:25
Now there are nuances. For example, you know if somebody is listening, and this is very common. We get this question a lot. It’s like why don’t we just scale up on TikTok? Right, because the thing is TikTok is they actually have a lower share of wallet, according to Veros and CTC right now, and share of wallet is basically where are all of the people spending right now?
Victor Vo: 43:51
And I heard this on the State of E-Commerce podcast, I think a couple weeks ago, but it’s basically people are actually spending more money on meta. Now they’re, they’re shifting a lot of their money still, even because, uh, probably because it’s still a behemoth and when it comes to tiktok, they’re ironing out the kings. And also, if you look at the, the ecosystem of tiktok, and you’re seeing all the sales and the way they’re moving product through a tick tock shop, you’re seeing a lot of discounts. Right, the margins are praying, probably not there. It would be great for brand awareness. And then you can retarget and stuff and get them to. You know, meta and your whole uh owned ecosystem with email. But tick tock to sell your product. The margins are all low. Everything is like, hey, get 50 up, here’s a giant coupon, it’s a race and and the price is low.
Greg Shuey: 44:42
It’s inexpensive stuff that they’re selling on platform as well yeah, exactly.
Victor Vo: 44:47
So maybe that answers the question, but the the point or the short of it is I don’t know exactly where it’s going, but I still think that it plays a big role in e-commerce and business, and to master it is actually not to focus all your time and energy and learning the new buttons and tools and stuff. That’s probably, I would say, 30% 40% of your time. The 60% 50% would be. How do you become better at selling? How do you actually understand how to test messaging and stuff like that scientifically and also conceptually?
Greg Shuey: 45:26
Yeah, and I think the big takeaway for me from your last comment is the foundational principles of marketing and advertising don’t change. I think that is a big misconception. It’s like it changes. It doesn’t change. Platforms change, tactics change and the nuances of each platform. But if you know how to identify a customer, identify their pain points and problems, you can build messaging strategy, build creative, you can reach these people, you can engage them, nurture them and convert them. I think that’s a really good kind of stopping point. So thank you both. That was an awesome discussion. I really appreciate both of your time today.
Victor Vo: 46:10
It was great. Thanks for having us and you know, hopefully this is going to help a lot of brand owners out there. If there are any questions, you know they can reach us at Victor at adcrunchdigitalcom or Andrew at adcrunchdigitalcom. But yeah, it’s a crazy shootout right now with stuff and preparing for Q4, the time that we’re talking about this. But we love this stuff and we know on your side you’re out there supporting people as well, especially in something that hopefully we’ll be able to touch base on later. But, like the importance of SEO in this whole mix of marketing, because that’s still very foundational, I feel like a lot of people are kind of just letting that slide because of immediate gratification from things like that, but they play together really well and the point I’ll plug in there is that when your SEO is great, it actually makes it cheaper for you to advertise?
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.
