How Obvi scales Meta ads

Hey everyone,

Thanks for stopping by for another bite to chew on.

“How do you guys scale Facebook?”

We get this a lot. Even though we often share tactics and fundamentals pretty often, it’s still one of the most frequent requests we get. 

Probably for two big reasons:

1. There are a bunch of different ways to manage Meta advertising.   

2. The way to manage Meta advertising changes all the time.

So we’re going to share our updated process with you today, from how we plan for creative volume down to how we structure our ad account. 

Ready?

On the Menu

• First - How to develop creative at volume

• Second - Finding angles

• Third - Account setup

How to develop creative at volume

We’ve said it often and you’ve heard it by now, but - you need creative volume and diversity to scale aggressively on Meta. 

It’s important that your company and your team fundamentally understand this. 

Without the expectation of high volume and notable variation baked into your ops, it will be difficult to get proper buy-in. It’s fine to be the creative strategist or the VP of marketing who believes this, but if you’re on an island in your organization it will be impossible to get the flywheel turning. 

We test at least 30 new ads per week at Obvi. So your team can’t be lukewarm about this process. Everyone has to be all-in.

Anyways, here’s how we tackle this - 

Our in-house team is me (Ash) and two graphic designers/video editors. Then we also work with three different creative agencies. 

We do this because we want a lot of different ideas and perspectives when it comes to the ideation and concepting phase. 

Remember - you need a lot of different ads, so a wide range of ideas is important.

With that crew on board, our weekly output goals are:

• 10-12 different angles

• 80% new angles

• 20% iterations

• 3-6 ads per angle

That gives us between 30-72 new ads, with 80% of them being totally fresh. 

No matter how much effort you put into your account, most ads are losers. They flop immediately, or they only spend profitably for a while before dying. 

It’s the nature of the beast, which is why you want more shots on goal. A new winning ad can unlock a new audience and enable fresh scale. 

At Obvi, each of our big winners is worth at least six figures of profitable spend.  

Tool of the Week - Triple Whale Sonar

We all know media buying in DTC has never been more challenging. 

A big reason for that is all the privacy stuff, starting with iOS14. 

With evolving privacy standards, identifying all users and events on your site has become more complex, which can impact how platforms like Meta optimize your results.

Without a solution, you could be missing 30-40% (or more) of your conversions. Those signals are just lost, leaving you in the dark about what’s really working.

Triple Whale is trying to change all that with Sonar - Triple Whale’s integration with Meta Conversions API.

Combined with their first-party pixel, Sonar adds enriched data from your Shopify store plugging all the user journey gaps that plague DTC marketing.

That means improved event matching, user identification, and conversion capture. 

And THAT means Meta can optimize around what is truly happening on your site. 

No more media buying with one hand tied behind your back. 

Triple Whale + Sonar gives you intelligence, attribution, and sophisticated tracking all in a single platform. 

Want to take your marketing intelligence to the next level? Learn more about Sonar here. 

Finding Angles

The fact that winning ads are rare does NOT mean you should just throw spaghetti at the wall. 

Your creative still has to rep your product, communicate your value props, and resonate with your target audience. 

Think of it like this - 

You want to increase the chances of finding a winner with your angle research, but you are also engaged in a process of gradually improving the performance of your entire ad account as you go.

So while it might get more difficult to beat your current winners, it’s because you should be trying to consistently raise the bar in terms of aggregated account performance. 

Anyways, all that to say don’t under-invest in the research and angle phase. 

The goal isn’t actually to get as much new stuff into market as possible, it’s to give Meta enough viable options to find your audience. 

You need good lures to catch big fish. Not just lines in the water.

Our first step in angle development is user research. We talked about this in-depth recently when we mentioned that your customers are the best copywriters. 

We start out with our post-purchase surveys. We’ve tested a lot of different question types here, but the ones that tend to generate the most insight for us go like this:

• How do you feel about your current problem or issue?

• What have you done to solve this problem in the past?

• How would you feel if you solved this problem?

We’ve made this purposefully generic so it’s easier to apply to your brand, but you get the idea. 

Answers to these questions, especially when taken together, tend to give us a clear idea of what our customers are looking for and how to frame solutions for them. 

We don’t stop there though. We also go over user reviews on the site and on Amazon, as well as user comments on our Facebook ads and social accounts. 

Sometimes we also interface with our top-performing influencers to see what angles they are testing and what might be working. 

Next up is creative review and inspiration. 

Of course, we’re always looking at our own ads’ performance to see what is sticking and what isn’t.

Sometimes we look at creative that managed high engagement but modest to low sales to see if we can iterate and improve the conversion rate. 

We also take a spin through Facebooks ads library and other tools that allow us to check out what other brands are doing. 

Sometimes you can find great ideas so you don’t have to start from scratch - even from companies that are outside of your category or niche.

The last thing we make sure to do is develop messaging that hits different points in the awareness phase:

• Problem unaware

• Problem aware 

• Solution aware

• Brand aware (but not sold yet)

This way you’re introducing natural variation into your ads and developing an ecosystem of content that can act as a kind of natural funnel. 

Ad account structure

If you’ve been in the game for a while, you’ve probably seen some wacky setups in Facebook Ad Manager. I know we have. 

But most media buyers have evolved to relatively consolidated account structures these days.

Here’s how we do it:

Two campaigns. One for scaling winners. Another for testing. 

The testing campaign is where most of the action happens. 

Here are the basics:  

• Broad targeting (age, gender)

• ABO

• Cost caps

• One ad set per angle

• 3-5 ads per ad set

• Exclusions = 180 day customers & 180 day site visitors

Let’s go over some of this…

• Going ABO in the ad test campaign helps us control spend by angle so we can turn things down, off, or up - depending on performance.

• Given that we use cost caps, we inflate the budget a bit so the system can spend when it hits on something that works but won’t run away otherwise. 

• Grouping ads by angle in our ad sets allows us to “race” similar concepts against each other, so Meta is comparing apples to apples in the test.

• We also don’t like to overload the ad set with too many creatives. You want to give each ad enough breathing room to take off (or not) within a seven-day window.

• Speaking of which, that’s how we start to narrow down winners - 50 or more conversions in 7 days indicates we might have something and it becomes a candidate to move to the scaling campaign**.

• **If you’re using lowest cost instead of cost caps, you can structure your budget with this formula: 

• (50 conversions X target CPA) / 7 = daily budget.

• So if you’re target CPA is $50, set your daily budget to ($50X$50)/7 = $357 per day**

• For exclusions, we segment out past customers (180 days) AND website visitors (180 days). This helps avoid overlap and it forces the system to find new potential buyers and audiences, which is what we’re looking for when testing new ads.

Sum it up

So there you have it. 

Our framework for a creative flywheel process and an ad account structure that has helped us profitably scale on Meta this year. 

Now - you should NOT take this as gospel. 

And you shouldn’t write this in stone as an iron-clad SOP. 

Because everyone’s business is different and, as we all know, digital advertising changes all the time. 

But, for now, this is what is working for Obvi.

And hopefully, it helps you develop a system that works for your brand too.  

All the best,

Ron and Ash