2025 Guide to Profitable META Media Buying

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and we have two very special guests with us today. We have Delaney Quinn, who is our director of paid social here at Common Thread Collective, and Mr. Tony Chop returning our VP of Paid Media here at Common Thread. 

What's going on guys?

[00:00:21] Tony Chopp: Nice to see you, Richard. I feel like we've been spending a bunch of time together recently, and I, I'm here for it.

[00:00:26] Richard Gaffin: absolutely. Same

[00:00:27] Delaney Quinn: Yeah, happy.

[00:00:28] Richard Gaffin: We just. What's

[00:00:30] Delaney Quinn: I said I'm happy to be joining.

[00:00:31] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, absolutely. Cool. So I think what we want to talk through today is something that we've been having conversations at the agency about over the past two, three weeks, which is all of the ways that we have been shifting our buying methodology here at Common Thread Collective to accommodate some of the ways that meta is changing its algorithm changing some of the tools and.

Or some of the tools available to media buyers as well. So essentially what we wanna do here is just walk through, give you guys a sense of how we're shifting our strategy here at CTC and kind of what the upshot is, I think, for everybody in general. So, let's, let's dive in here. Maybe we'll start with you, Delaney, just talking about essentially the end of the cost cap agency era, which is kinda what we were calling ourselves and towards something else.

So talk about what we were and kind of what we're shifting towards.

[00:01:20] Delaney Quinn: Yeah, and, and we're still loving cost caps here. We're still using cost caps, but we're moving into a different phase of what was the cost cap agency era. We're looking to be still very disciplined in driving a rigid framework for our clients and having an impact on overall business. That's still something that's super important to us, but we wanna do that in a little bit of a different approach.

So we used to come in and be super, super structured and look at a seven day click only attribution window. Everything would have a cost control. We would give every single new concept a new campaign in these accounts. We got really, really. Broken out and segmented and we wanna see some changes to this.

You know, met has been making a lot of changes, different updates to their algorithm, and they're pushing for more consolidation, and we wanna see some better alignment there while still staying true to who we are and making sure that our spend is profitable and really having an impact on the top line here.

[00:02:20] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha.

[00:02:20] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I, sorry, Richard, I, you were gonna say something that I just, I have, I have so much to say about this topic, is having, been through as many, many seasons at at CTC I. Like reflecting on this portion of the journey, which I, I think probably represents like really 2022 and 2023 the, the post post pandemic challenges that many of our brands went through the supply chain issues et cetera, et cetera. And, and also the evolution of the the CTC system, the growth map and stat and how, how we, how we operationalize and execute the service. What, what happened in over those years was a lot of, a lot of, a lot of rigorousness in our media buying strategy. And it, and there's nothing wrong with that.

It's actually, it's actually really good. the, the rigorousness, like, so if I were to look at a Meta Ads account in 2023 here at CTC, what, what I would see is many, many campaigns, 20, 30, 40, 50 campaigns, all of them using cost cap bidding and all of them using seven day click really exclusively. That gave us that gave us a, a really, really structured framework and a really strong identity for who CTC is and how we execute media buying strategy. I think it was, I think it was really helpful for us to our clients create this predictable, profitable growth that we were after at the time. So, and it's just really fascinating to, to see how. Not only is meta changing, but also the needs of our clients are changing a as we go into this in, into the future. And it's not enough just to create profit. have to find ways to create to amplify growth. And what Delaney's doing here is helping us. Take what works really well take, take the pieces that worked really well from this, this season, which is about a focus, a, a heavy focus on using bidding that allows us to control for downside risk, but also beginning to open the aperture into different ways of exploring the growth side of the equation.

And, and she's gonna talk about some thoughts about attribution and thoughts about testing, but. I think this is just such a fascinating turning point for, for our journey.

[00:04:57] Richard Gaffin: Definitely. And I think like one, one thing I'll observe here because I think it's important to call out is what you said earlier, Delaney, which is that what we are not saying is that cost caps are over.

[00:05:06] Tony Chopp: Mm.

[00:05:06] Richard Gaffin: cost controls are now part of a, slightly more flexible system that we're building.

And I think prior to this, like you were pointing out Tony, prior to this shift, rather, we were very, very strict and part of the reason we were strict is that meta itself was not providing. The tools that we needed to create the outcomes that we wanted for our clients. I think that's kind of a big part of this as well. And, and that's shifted somewhat. So let's talk about then the specifics around what's changed. So we know kind of the direction it's going, but what specifically are we changing here?

[00:05:38] Delaney Quinn: I would say there's, there's like two different main pillars of this, right? What are we here at CTC doing and what has meta changed? 'cause meta has seen a plethora of changes, the rollout of different bidding tactics and platforms. So many updates to their algorithm. The most recent one here just hitting us.

They're moving into this idea of a SC only and having your three turnons within those campaigns. I. Alongside all of that, as an agency, we are truly embracing measurement and incrementality to prove out all of these changes happening in platform and in the algorithm. And we're back in that with testing roadmaps and findings and having solid results and being okay with tests not being successful, knowing that meta is pushing changes, they have incremental attribution that they're testing.

You know, we're not sure if that'll be successful, but we believe in incrementality rates behind that and a testing roadmap to prove it out.

[00:06:35] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay. So let's, will go into kinda each one of these things specifically. But let, let's, let's double back to kinda what you were saying, Tony, around opening the aperture for growth. 'cause I wanna dig into that a little bit. you'd mentioned a little bit prior, like current buying, or our, I should say our previous buying methodology was a little bit strict and a little bit limited, or it was becoming limiting. So talk about what. What these changes do to kind of accommodate this new the idea of opening the aperture for gr

[00:07:09] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I, I think, I think the, the best way to approach this question is through the idea of attribution,

[00:07:17] Richard Gaffin: mm-hmm.

[00:07:18] Tony Chopp: and I'm gonna, I'm gonna pair that with the, the simultaneous journey that CTC has gone on over the last six or eight months in incrementality measurement.

[00:07:33] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:34] Tony Chopp: So past time. Every CTC campaign you would look at in a meta ads account seven day click, right? We, we knew intuitively and from experience that using seven day click would create, help us create the business outcomes that we were seeking. We also knew intuitively and from experience that using longer view attribution windows could be problematic in different accounts as far as being able to control for spend. Or spending more but not seeing the business outcome. So we, we sort of absent having a more complete measurement framework, la incrementality, we defaulted to seven day click because it's, it's the, it's safe and it's predictable, honestly. 

[00:08:21] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:22] Tony Chopp: So, but I'm gonna talk about a specific example of a place where employing a wider attribution window. Maybe is likely useful and perhaps even necessary. The example is accounts that have lower conversion volume for whatever reason. Two of the common reasons could be smaller budget or really, really high a OV. You've had a bunch of experiences with accounts over the last year or two that have an A OV that's much higher than our sort of normal. 80, a hundred dollars a OV. Think about things like furniture. Six, $800,000 a OV. challenge in these situations is about getting enough signal into the advertising account to operate in the way that we want to operate, which is to use the bidding, the bidding algorithms to make the bidding decisions right. So this is a, a perfect example of how when we're looking at and evaluating a business, our, our key, our key guiding post for any campaign is that we can get out of the learning phase, that we can get 50 conversions per week. One of the way, and one of the ways that we may be able to do that by incorporating. One day view attribution. If the budget requirements necessitate that we have to get more signal into the thing. So that, that's one way of thinking about opening the aperture. Incorporate view attribution in a, in a smart way, in a necessary way to feed the, the algorithm, the information it needs to, to optimize. I'm gonna add one more point. Delaney's got a bunch. one more point. The, the top, the thing about attribution me and measurement in general is the, the way that I think about it is there isn't, it's not a right or wrong sort of problem. It's not that seven day click is right in seven and one is wrong. What is for sure true is that they have a different incremental contribution to the business. So the other thing that that has been part of this journey of measurement of incrementality is learning something really, really simple, which is when we run really tight click attribution on meta, what's actually happening is what we see in what we see reported in, in meta is actually under reported.

So if, if your meta ads account is showing a two to one and you're on seven day click the results, your business results are actually likely better than that.

[00:10:58] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:10:58] Tony Chopp: The flip side of the coin is view attribution or longer attribution. Windows in general are not no incrementality. They're just less, right? Likely less.

So in that, in that same meta ads account, if it was seven day click and it was reporting a two, that's likely underreporting by a little bit, and if there's view attribution in there. It's likely over-reporting a little bit, but it's not, it's not. One is totally right, one is totally wrong. It's the the, the spectrum is closer than that. And this connects to how we set targets, how our growth strategy team sets targets. Okay. I'll shut up. I know you guys have stuff to say.

[00:11:38] Delaney Quinn: I, I was, I think that piece though was so important that you were ending on right there because that's where you can see this type of test go wrong. If you're, you wanna look at your high, a higher a OB product and you add view into your account and you don't change your cost control and platform, I.

You're gonna see an infl in performance and more spend, but your business isn't gonna feel that impact. You need to rely on the incremental and incrementality side of it and readjust those targets or else testing into something like this. You're not going to feel the impact in the way that you should, and I think that's a piece that you can get wrong really easily with brands if you're not adjusting anything accordingly.

It can't just be apples to apples. We gotta make a little bit of a change there.

[00:12:19] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay, so let's, let's actually, let's go through this and I think if we should put this up as a visual on, at least on the YouTube, but this is like kind of a breakdown of all of the different dimensions by which we are sort of changing our overall campaign structure or, or overall buying strategy, I guess.

So, Delaney, why don't you walk us through each one of those. We've already touched on some of them, but just to kind of give us

[00:12:39] Delaney Quinn: Yeah,

[00:12:40] Richard Gaffin: of, of what's happening here.

[00:12:42] Delaney Quinn: sure. And before I jump into that too, the one thing I will say, this is in, it's laid out this way for a very important reason because we wanna take a real. Sequential approach to these things so we can feel the impact of the changes we're making. We're not going into accounts or recommending you reset to all of these best practices.

We're following kind of down this chart of making those optimizations and platform starting with bidding. We believe that bidding can have a really big impact in the account. Cost controls used to be the way to go. We're seeing a mix of different cost controls, so cost cap, vid cap, or a Monroe as work well.

They're operating on two very dis different systems in the platform looking at value versus volume, and that can have different impacts on the business if you're trying to grow. A higher a OV product, maybe the value Min Monroe as is the way to go. If you need more volume of purchases and conversions in your account, cost controls and the mix of them together works really well.

We're also testing to some highest volume, very small, you know, percentage is our recommendation, but we're seeing that work in some places, and we'll get into that a little bit later. We've talked a lot about attribution, really testing into by need for view, but our best practice is to rely on a seven day click to get your campaigns outta learning.

Something that is a little different for us is we used to really look at concept. Every new concept got a new campaign. We're moving towards consolidation and ad sets and A BO where we still have some control in the algorithm and how we're pushing spend to these ad sets. But you're gonna see a lot less campaigns live in a CTC account now than you would a year ago today.

We have some updates to our audience strategy looking at laps. Customers, an audience that we used to overlook. We would just group them in with those active audiences. But it's an audience that you can nurture a little bit and pull them back into the fold after that lapse point. And lastly, which I, I think this is a really, really big one that aligns well with meta.

We really use creative for scale, and that still stands, but it's diverse, creative. That's going to reach a new audience and take your account to the next level. If you're seeing stagnant new customer growth and you're still pumping in a bunch of volume, you can't break your top winner. You're not diverse enough.

You need to find a different angle or offer or a pathway to go down to see that next unlock.

[00:15:00] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. So we'll dig into each one of those kind of one by one. But I, I think like the first thing is that we should dig into is the sequential testing or the sequence of kind of rolling some of this stuff out. So ex talk to us about like, why it's important to do this and kind of the way that we're and, and I guess what the sequence is.

[00:15:17] Delaney Quinn: Yeah. So if you go into an account tomorrow and you say, okay, I wanna follow all of cts best, CTCs best practices, I'm gonna reset my bidding from seven day click to seven day only. I'm gonna put a cost control in there. I am going to redefine all my audiences. Your account is gonna be very confused.

You're also not gonna be able to point to that. You're probably gonna see a little bit of a decline in spend while you stabilize out. You might feel the impact on new customer revenue. And, and we don't want that to happen for our brands. So a sequential approach is really important so we can point to the each change we made and the impact it had on the brand.

Starting with bidding, that is something that we really do believe in. Getting into a solid spot and making sure we have the cost controls in place, moving into attribution and following that up with audiences.

[00:16:05] Richard Gaffin: So we talked, touched a little bit on cost caps, andro as and why both of those matter and they're both controls, right? In a sense. So it's not necessarily like, although you did allude to highest volume earlier, it's not necessarily that we're saying every single bit of type is great. But talk about like why including both of these is important.

[00:16:22] Delaney Quinn: Definitely. So a lot of times you'll see brands will come and they'll be like, you know, I'm not selling enough of a certain product. I'm, I'm hitting revenue goals maybe, but I need to get through inventory. I need to push volume. I'm gonna recommend that you launch a campaign on a cost control. It's really good at going after the cheapest conversion it can get within that control you have in place.

It's gonna drive up your purchases, but it isn't gonna help you drive more a OV or more revenue. And that's where we'll see from the value side. If we wanna say maybe it's an apparel company and they, they package up their things, you can get. Two, three at a time. I would set that on a Monroe as go after value.

You need a little higher a OV, it's gonna reach that for you. Same brand, two different cost controls in place, two different reasons. So that's what you'll typically see. You'll have a different reason for activating on both, but they both work well together and can help support the business. It's not one or the other.

[00:17:17] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. And I, I just wanna ask, or Tony, did you got something.

[00:17:21] Tony Chopp: Well, I was just gonna say, I think the other thing that's. That's interesting about bidding in general is the, the connection to the audience that gets targeted. So we, we see this across, across advertising platforms like you. Basically, the way to say it is you get what you ask for, right? So, and, regardless of what advertising platform you're talking about, the bidding strategy you use has an impact on the audience that gets targeted. So I think one of the things that's interesting about this idea of like deploying both cost cap and Minera is the potential to hits different audiences through the mechanism of having different bidding. And, and then the other thing just to add to Monroe is like con connecting back to the idea of how the meta platform is changing. So RO is relatively is the newest bidding strategy available in meta ads, and then connecting to the, the whole A SC arc a SC when it, when it first launched min Ro.

There, there's actually no cost control bidding available at, in the very beginning, and CTC is like, okay, well that's, that's kind of sketchy. We can't use that. And then we got cost control, and then we finally got ROIs available to us in a SC. And now with like. We're getting the the, the messaging from meta about like, Hey, no more BAU campaigns only a SC.

So I think it's, it's just interesting to think about, and this, this connects back to this idea of like, as the meta platform changes, we need to evolve our media buying strategy alongside it.

[00:18:49] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. No, I think, I think that's a, that's a good point. Is that part of it is that like the, the platform has evolved to. Allow us to achieve the goals that we wanna achieve for our clients in a way that it, that just wasn't the case before. As you mentioned, a SE not having cost controls at first, that sort of thing.

It'll creates this scenario where we have to do a workaround, but that's not quite the same. That scenario's not quite the same anymore. So, so, speaking of which, 'cause I think this is an interesting one, let's move on to attribution. Double back to that real quick. Talk about bringing in seven day click, one day view.

So Tony already mentioned a couple of circumstances in which bringing one day view in makes sense, but let's talk about when it makes sense to use to add one day view into your attribution window.

[00:19:29] Delaney Quinn: I, I will, I'll typically say if I. Notice a bunch of account campaigns are still in learning, and I know it's a higher a OV product. That's the initial sign to me that you, you need a little more signal into your account. That's the biggest thing. Tony, you touched on that earlier. It's all about the signal and the delivery that we wanna provide to meta.

If you are getting out learning and you're delivering to your targets and your goals, we're not recommending you test into view. We think we're in a good, solid spot and we'll keep moving forward on that seven day click. But if, if you are really struggling on that volume front, then this is the pathway I recommend going down.

And, and it's not a pathway where you're gonna reset your whole account tomorrow to include view. It's going to be an a, a sequential part of your account. Maybe it's within a top performing campaign that you really believe in. Including view in it and doing a strategy behind that test, making sure your targets are inflated so you'll get a clean read.

You can actually track it back to incremental growth on the brand side versus just seeing your return go up in platform and getting more delivery.

[00:20:33] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha, so, so by kind of running, let's say one day view on maybe a best performing campaign or whatever, that gives you a sense of, I mean, I get, I mean this is probably simplistic, but the difference between the seven day click version and the seven day one day view version gives you some sense of the incrementality difference that you can then apply if you were to go one day view with the rest of your campaigns.

You can apply that, read to them in order to get a sense of like. Of what the difference is and how you should adjust your goals. Is that roughly correct?

[00:21:02] Delaney Quinn: Yeah.

[00:21:02] Tony Chopp: Yeah.

[00:21:03] Delaney Quinn: And platform too. That breakdown, you're able to report out. Even if you're setting up just a seven day click campaign, you can read your view for including one day view in it, which is a really cool way initially to see where your conversion volume might be coming from or might not be coming from.

[00:21:19] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think there, there's like a connection here to the way CTC thinks about and models on, on growth strategy. where we're seeking, we, we have like two kind of like core pathways. One maximize contribution margin, a k, a maximize profit, and the other is maximize new customer acquisition.

Right. There's gonna be very different financial like outcomes there from a profit standpoint and a volume standpoint. And I think so much of this for us on the media side, connects to that, that idea that businesses can, can and all are on different pathways and, and then in different seasons. And this, this whole thing is like so much of CTC in the late. 2023 was about like helping our partners like reset from a profit standpoint. And so much of where we're headed is about maintaining that foundation. While, and I'll use this phrase again, like opening the aperture for growth. So I'll, I'll give you a for example, if we have a, a partner we're working with and. the business is after market share or is, is in pursuit of something, something other than bottom line margin, whatever, whatever that season is. They're per in pursuit of, maximum new customer acquisition. We're gonna come in and look at how do we deploy more signal into the ME ads account, potentially through view.

How do we. How do we pair that with incrementality studies so that we can get the right targets and platform where we're gonna put ourselves in a posture of seeking more volume, right? Based on the business's goal and based on, based on the goals that our, our partners and growth strategy are are coming to us with.

So we're, we're giving ourselves a bigger toolkit to, to approach the solving the problem in, in more, in ways that are more aligned.

[00:23:10] Richard Gaffin: Part of the sense I get too, is that in that sort of 2023 period, 20 22, 20 23, a lot of our clients were in a situation where predictable, profitable growth for them was a matter of life and death. that may not quite be the case anymore. Is that accurate?

[00:23:26] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I think, you know, post, the post pandemic period was marked by, I think, some macroeconomic factors in the e-commerce industry. Like really notably, like, like financing access to capital went, went away fundamentally. And Richard, I'm, you've had, like, I can't count how many conversations with Taylor about, about this season in e-commerce.

So it, it was such a shift from a a real and a really wild. Growth period coming out of Covid money everywhere. Nobody cared about profit.

[00:23:59] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:00] Tony Chopp: In. And then a real shift in the other direction where all of these e-commerce businesses had to generate profit to keep their lights on. There's no funding outside of the, the cash flow they could create with their business operations.

Right? When you put it through that lens, it like makes perfect sense. Like the, the CTC media buying strategy met the moment perfectly, really, really tight control. Now, you know, over the last couple weeks we've got some interesting interesting things in the news that are are, are, are creating the potential for us to continue to meet that profit narrative narrative. At the same time, we're smarter now than we were two years ago on our measurement stack, and we believe, we believe these are represent levers and pathways to go back into growth.

[00:24:51] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay. So, and speaking of that and, and just the general idea of opening the aperture for growth. Let's jump into the way we're changing, thinking about segmentation, about audience roles, that sort of thing. So just recap then real quick, what we used to do and then what we're moving towards.

[00:25:07] Delaney Quinn: We would use to go into accounts and take a full acquisition approach if you had purchased with a brand, does not matter how long ago we were most likely not targeting you with our ads, we had full new customer. Strategy. There might be a little, little bit of retention play in that. But we're kind of shifting that.

We're looking at it from a different lens because when you look at that lapsed customer definition, which we can pull in stat list for our clients, it's really great. But we can see this example, 160 days, you've hit that point. You're no longer really buying from this brand. You're not maybe familiar with that brand.

That's an audience we wanna go after. They might not be falling into your marketing existing tactics anymore. We can treat them almost like a new customer, to get them back into the fold, to be part of all of this again, to reeducate them, maybe show them new products. We don't wanna treat them as an existing customer after that point in time.

And we do find value in reengaging them through our, our system here.

[00:26:07] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:26:08] Tony Chopp: Yeah, this one, this one just gets me so much. Like, I, I think when, like in performance marketing and like we have kick around these phrases, like new customer existing customer, and I just think about my own myself, like practically in my own life. Like if I buy a t-shirt from you. You don't own me. Like I can go and buy a t-shirt from anyone else at any point in time. And so like, I, I am practically and functionally not, not your customer. And I think this, this really represents a point where like, CTCs unique data set is very compelling. So every business has differences in the repeat purchase cycle. And our tool status really helps us understand this uniquely for, for each of our partners.

And it's really quite, quite fundamentally different. So I. I think what Delaney's describing here in this, the screenshot that's that's being shown on this table is an example of that data that's coming out of stat list that is showing a individual businesses repeat purchase cycle. And what this is saying is for, for this particular business 36 days after their first, first purchase, they have entered a category of default at risk. Yeah. And I think that, like, I think this is. This is such a fun place for us to go and explore and redefine how we think about media buying. As opposed to strictly like the whole customer file is is, is excluded from our advertising efforts.

[00:27:34] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So is part of what you're saying then that like we have via stats sort of exclusive or unusual access in a, in a kind of a granular way to to basic, to this lapsed customer data so we can, we're actually able to target it in a way that maybe we weren't before or people in general aren't able to target?

Is that accurate?

[00:27:53] Delaney Quinn: Yeah.

[00:27:54] Tony Chopp: absolutely.

[00:27:54] Delaney Quinn: I'll say too, like, we're not recommending a campaign for your lapsed customers. We're viewing them as part of our NCA efforts. We're looping them in to the efforts that we have going to grow new customers to treat them. Like, to your point, Tony, you don't owe me if I only purchased from you once.

Right? Like I wanna retreat you like a new customer. We're not segmenting them out. We're inclusive.

[00:28:17] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Well, yeah, and that kind of goes, that's almost like in some ways a creative thing too, right? There's a, a previous, or in this previous setup, rather having this idea that for some reason if somebody hadn't purchased from you in six months or in a year or whatever, they're not gonna respond to ad reintroducing them to the brand. in a sense, of course, they'll recognize you in a way that a brand new customer might not. But what we're saying is that in terms of the actual data shows, they behave as if they're a brand new customer. So what's the point in excluding them? Does that sound right?

[00:28:49] Delaney Quinn: I think that's fair. I'll say too, right, there's brands that do want to put a little bit of spend behind the existing, so from that first purchase day into some of that at risk. That strategy is gonna look different, right? The language you can use for them and how you can speak to them. They're already a little familiar with you.

Maybe only one purchase, not super familiar, but they have some sort of connection early enough on where your messaging should be different. You see a lot of brands using the same creative for both of those audiences, and, and that is not the best approach. You won't see as much success as you would if you treated them like the two different audiences that they are.

[00:29:26] Richard Gaffin: Hmm. Gotcha.

[00:29:27] Tony Chopp: Y. Yeah.

[00:29:28] Richard Gaffin: cool. Go

[00:29:29] Tony Chopp: Sorry, I wanna add a couple more things in here too. There's a re there's an important connection to the, the size of the business and how big the customer file is, in, in something that we've seen. And there's a connection to, a connection to this idea of measurement and incrementality, right? So just like, just like there's. There's no right or wrong way to approach attribution. It's about understanding the impact of the business, the, it's not. It's not a story of, Hey, we shouldn't spend media dollars to talk to our existing customer file. It's about understanding the incrementality of talking to these customer sets, setting targets appropriately, and then delivering as much media dollars as possible at that target in order to reengage with these people.

Especially around things like new product offer, new product drops or sale moments, or any, especially around any, any marketing moment. So.

[00:30:25] Richard Gaffin: Okay. Okay, cool. So let's, let's let's jump into, and I touched briefly on creative. We'll get back to that, but let's talk about consolidation real quick. So again, let's, let's kind of go over our former. Kind of setup was this really, really strict offer angle audience thing where every single new combination of those three factors got.

Its got a new campaign with three ads and there was a very specific way we set it up. Now it sounds like we're moving away from that altogether towards just throwing everything into an A. SC is maybe a simplified way of saying it, but why don't you describe for still like what this consolidation looks like for us.

[00:30:59] Delaney Quinn: Yeah, and I'll say too, so we weren't just doing it based on audience offer and angle. We would have multiple campaigns with the same audience offer and angle. Like anytime there was a new creative delivery, we gave it a new campaign to give it a chance, and we're moving away from that. And we wanna find ourselves asking the question is, what is so different about this creative?

Is there something so different about it? Is there a different attribution or bidding method that you want? And if you're finding yourself saying, yes, that is, that is a good reason to launch a new campaign. And we think of things like a new product launch, a promotion, those testing pieces. Most times you're gonna find yourself saying no.

And if you don't find yourself saying no, you probably should be saying no, and it's gonna lead to more consolidation. There's a couple of different ways you can approach this. In the world of cost controls, it's really important that your campaigns have similar AOVs. 'cause if you're setting a cost control and you have varying AOVs, you're not gonna deliver the way that you need to.

So that's a big focus. As we are setting up this new consolidated approach, we're looking at the a v in the margin for all of our products and really defining different categorizations of this to set up these campaigns. And then within those campaigns, you have the ability now to have some ad sets. So if you are truly reaching a totally different audience with your creative, very diverse, different messaging that deserves a new ad set within an already existing campaign, it does not deserve a brand new campaign, which is the way that we used to go, where Black Friday, we had to close to a hundred campaigns live, right?

We never wanna see that again. We wanna be more consolidated. While still giving us the control to reach new audiences.

[00:32:41] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. And just to, to clarify for everybody, are we still doing one ad per ad set?

[00:32:47] Delaney Quinn: No, you can, we can go up to 50. Maybe not. Yeah, you can. So, a SC is actually capping a limit now. So you, you can't do 150, but you can go up to 50. So if you have already an existing ad set with the similar audience, offer an angle. Don't create a new one. Put it into the existing one and build on that and see if you can take over a top performer, see how things stabilize out.

That's your true read on if I'm seeing a winner or not. If we just start launching new ad sets for every new delivery, we're gonna get into the same approach. Right? So we wanna make sure that we're strategically thinking about where the creative is going, and then talking about the difference in the creative that we can get.

[00:33:26] Richard Gaffin: Right. Gotcha. I realized as I asked that question, what I really meant was, are we still doing one ad set per campaign, which is what we used to do, which you've already

[00:33:33] Delaney Quinn: Yeah. Also, no,

[00:33:34] Richard Gaffin: So multiple ad sets. Yeah, exactly. 

[00:33:36] Delaney Quinn: The things.

[00:33:37] Richard Gaffin: actually so I, I, it might be useful. I. See if we get something out of this.

So you have like a very specific way of thinking about when a new campaign should be launched, which is, do I need a new setting? The most common sort of scenario under which that happens is if you're launching a product or, or a campaign rather, that pushes to a different A OV than something else. So in terms of building a new ad set, and you've already touched on this a little bit, but what is kind of like the one thing or the sort of rubric that you use to determine whether a new one gets built?

Is it off? Is it angle and audience, or is there something else at play there?

[00:34:08] Delaney Quinn: Essentially, yes. I'll use just, okay. We have a generic retail apparel brand that we wanna set up this structure for. There's a lot of different products you can advertise for. Maybe very similar AOVs. You could be advertising. You know, athletic apparel for the person that wants to go to pit up a gym workout, do all of that in their apparel.

You could also be advertising it to the mom that wants to run errands and be comfortable with what she's doing with her kids. Two very different audiences that should have very different looking creatives, and in that sense, that could justify two ad sets within a campaign that are very similar products.

But we're trying to go after two very diverse audiences with them.

[00:34:52] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Makes sense. Okay, so, let's, let's jump into kind of like the final ish piece of the puzzle here, which is creative. And I think that arguably this is the most important part and there's kind of a major way that we're shifting it. So let's, let's talk about again, the fundamental shift away from the way that we used to think about volume towards diversification.

[00:35:10] Delaney Quinn: Yeah, meta is preaching, creative verification, and uh, that's something that we also really strongly believe in too. That's how you're going to reach new audiences, and, and we're having a lot of conversations with clients. Too, where we're trying to break away from this mindset of creating concepts, but we're creating diverse ads with them.

We're defining the persona we wanna reach and we're using not to get to that diverse audience for us. And, and we have a cheat sheet that we like to use with our clients too, that helps us define what. Is different. What does it mean to look different to the eye? It can be a little not the, the easiest to tell what difference is, but we really do rely back on this as a helpful like starting block.

Meta supports this as well of how you can define Nick 'cause it can get really granular, but it can also be as simple as simple a, a static product shot and a whole UGC lifestyle. Vari like variance. That's a very two different diverse creatives for the same product.

[00:36:09] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:36:10] Tony Chopp: This is so, such an interesting thing 'cause I've been. We've been doing all this conversation around YouTube recently, it's just so fascinating in the, in the Google ads world, in, in the YouTube world audience targeting is still a thing. You gotta go in there and target this audience and that audience, and it's very clear to me how how different the targeting algorithms work between Google ads and, and YouTube specifically, and meta. And the difference is, if you haven't read the, the meta engineering blog posts about Andromeda and the machine learning technology that underpins the, the targeting in meta ads, the, the very simple, the very simple way to understand it is we, what we've said for years, the creative targets the audience. Meaning if you have a picture of men in your ads, your ad is going to target men. You have a picture of women in your ads. Your ad's gonna target women. And this is the reason, like the whole reason why the shift on meta from doing audience and interest targeting to broad targeting has has worked because the machine learning understands what's in the ad, the ad, the visual ad unit itself.

And this is why this. Delaney, we've seen examples of where we've worked with partners that have said, I'm producing tons of creative, and, and we're saying, wait a minute. That's all product on color block as a, for example. And that, that's, that's not what we're saying. It's not about tons of creative, it's about a, a high volume of really different creative, and that's how we access different audiences.

[00:37:55] Richard Gaffin: So talk to me about you. You mentioned a high volume of different creative. How has our relationship to volume changed? So obviously it's, it's, there has to be, diversification is an important part of that, but prior to sort of this shift, a lot of our kind of creative volume, the way we thought about creative volume is around this is the cost cap. Therefore, in order to get through budget, you are going to need 75 ads to get through all that budget next month, whatever the case may be. do we think about. is our relationship to volume itself then shifted? Is it similar? Is it still we're cranking out a hundred ads, or is it just basically adding another layer of difficulty on top of our previous volume requirement?

How would you think about that?

[00:38:36] Tony Chopp: So, actually I, volume piece of the puzzle is still very much built on. The idea of like how much spend we can get through ad units in any given ad. And Richard, I'm sure you've been part of the conversations and discussions around Compass and the creative planning, creative volume planning work that we're doing on the status side to help continue to ask and answer that question. So I think so. Compass is helping us continue to get to what that number is, and the number's different for, for every business. But what I, my, what I'm seeing, and Delaney, you tell me if you agree or disagree, is that you would be much better off producing 20 different ads that are really different in style, based on the cheat sheet that Delaney was showing versus 200 very similar ads.

[00:39:30] Delaney Quinn: And Meta has reports they can pull for brands too, that shows their creative similarity reports. And essentially when your creative is too similar, it's going to be deprioritized in the algorithm. And we see that a lot with brands who can throw out a high volume of creatives. You only see a couple of them really take off, and we're asked that question of, okay, well how do I get more spend here?

Why is it not spending? And it all comes back to the diversification of that volume. It's all the same. Essentially it's going after the same audience. You don't need all that. You, you need 20 very different ads, reaching different audiences and different formats to see a greater success.

[00:40:07] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so there's like, there's a clear, then I'm just kind of our, our, what we've seen is that there's a clear penalty, algorithmic penalty to cranking out a hundred variations with slightly different like colored backgrounds or something like that.

[00:40:22] Tony Chopp: you make a hundred, like let's just use the format. For example,

[00:40:25] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:26] Tony Chopp: you make a hundred static ad images that all look similar in the eyes of meta, you have made one ad.

[00:40:36] Richard Gaffin: Interesting.

[00:40:37] Tony Chopp: That might be a little bit extreme, but versus if you made one static image with product on white, a product on background. If you made a video, if you made something creator something UGC, if you had some really highly polished stuff, some lifestyle stuff. Now you've made however many, I just said, six or eight variations.

[00:41:00] Richard Gaffin: Well, no, there's an, there's an interesting like calculator tool in that, like how many, how many ads have you really made across like a number of different, so if what extent then is like, how many of the variables that are on this cheat sheet right now have to be different? In order for meta to recognize it as being, let's say, multiple ads.

[00:41:21] Delaney Quinn: I'd say like creator approach, creative approach, those things are very, very different. If you have. The same static image and a couple of different aspect ratios, they're still similar, right? You're gonna probably put those in the same ad still. You're not gonna break them up into two or three different ads.

'cause that would be similar. So some of that, like it's best practices to have those asset ratios, but you have it in one ad, it's not gonna get you the volume you need. Like a different creative approach like Lofi Creative versus a higher polished brand video would.

[00:41:53] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha.

[00:41:54] Tony Chopp: Yeah.

[00:41:55] Richard Gaffin: Go

[00:41:55] Tony Chopp: Yeah. I think I was just gonna say like, this is a really, this is a fundamental question, like at the root level. So the, the production, like the very starting point, the genesis of the ad. Needs to come from a different place, whether that's I'm shooting product photography by itself, or I'm shooting lifestyle photography of the, of the person using the product, or I have UGC.

So it really starts fundamentally at the very root level of the production level. Everything after that. Everything after that sort of root production is some sort of permutation of it, right? Whether it's an aspect ratio or a placement or a call to action. That, that I think it's really about thinking about how do, how do we create. Really different types of production and, and Delaney we're, we're seeing like the efficacy of this with you know, in, in our partnerships where we have our, our creator content offering. I think what's really interesting actually about that, just add a little side note, is where we're seeing the most efficacy from introducing that is into accounts that don't have that style of content already. Would you, would you agree with that?

[00:43:00] Delaney Quinn: Yeah, I a hundred percent agree. Adding that to account that has not. Not seen it before. It performs really, really well because it's so different from what it's used to seeing in the algorithm for that brand.

[00:43:11] Tony Chopp: Yeah, so this is like really a question of like, whatever you're really good at right now. Like if you're really good, let's just say you're really good at producing like super Hi-Fi content. Like everything is super polished. You need to go and do what you're uncomfortable

[00:43:23] Delaney Quinn: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:24] Tony Chopp: exactly where you need to go.

You need to go produce the thing that you're not producing now, and it probably makes you feel uncomfortable and squishy and weird. But that's precisely what what Meta is asking us for with the algorithm that's saying, Hey, this is how you're gonna reach new audiences.

[00:43:39] Richard Gaffin: Interesting. So you had mentioned Delaney. I think that, that sometimes it can be difficult to tell what counts as being sort of different enough. So, but then it also sounds like we're kind of saying that like as human beings, if an account visually looks to us as all the same, then the algorithm is able to see it the same way.

And that's maybe a good indicator that everything's too samey. But what are some of the factors that. Meta may read as being different enough that we as humans, like can't really tell visually.

[00:44:06] Delaney Quinn: Yeah, it's usually a very, like different background. If we are talking like model shots, the environment that they're in needs to be totally different. Even the same model across all these different backgrounds, activities could be flagged as the same. 'cause it's the same person that looks the same, it's gonna reach the same audience.

So you need to be thinking about. The models you're using, the spaces that you're using them in. If it's the background with static shots that look so different, how are you laying and displaying the product to look different? Even it's folded up, laying down, different colors, different, you know, even textures on the background to flip it up could help push you in the direction of diversification.

[00:44:46] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Interesting. Okay, cool. Well, I mean there's, there's lots to dig into there, but for, for the sake of our, our pod. Now, let's let's move on to our kind of final step here, which is round mid-funnel and testing. So talk about about how we're testing it to mid funnel objectives. As somebody who's been at CTC for a long time, I can't believe I'm seeing this. So tell me a little bit more about kind of what, what this means for us.

[00:45:07] Delaney Quinn: I am really excited for this one, and I think it's like very different and new to what we're talking about, and that can be a little intimidating. At first, but it can be a big unlock for brands. And I'll start by saying, we're not recommending investing 50% of your budget into this space by any means.

We're talking about testing into it with a smaller allocation of your budget for specific brands that we think it could be a big unlock. It really helps with warming up the audience. For certain products, it, it's back to the same conversation we were having about, ha adding in view. This is a place that could be really, really impactful for higher a ov businesses and products to really have a longer consideration window.

And we're only saying we have a seven day window in meta. Maybe we need to warm 'em up and test in the mid funnel for something like a landing page view or a certain amount of engagement on the page. We know that's a qualified user and we can then go track how our remarketing audiences are doing when launching something like this.

It's a bigger picture that we wanna embrace when we're looking. We've been really, really good at looking at in platform efficiency and the return we're driving and how that's correlated to the business. That's not gonna be the case with this. You're not gonna see your return hit with this campaign optimizing for landing page views.

But you're gonna feel the impact in other places of your business and other places in your account. And that can be a little scary to see at first and challenging to have that initial conversation. But it is a big unlock when you have it paired with the right information in your creative. This is another piece of the diverse creative you wanna be explaining more in this place.

For example, if we're, we mentioned furniture earlier, if we wanna sell. Couple thousand dollars piece of furniture. I wanna be explaining what the value of this is to the viewer. I wanna be showing and demonstrating maybe a perfect place for some UGC and getting them to the site with even more information to add to cart.

And then we're gonna re-hit 'em in other campaigns with the more action oriented purchase approach.

[00:47:07] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha.

[00:47:08] Tony Chopp: it, it is it is different, Richard, for sure.

[00:47:11] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:47:11] Tony Chopp: It's, so, it's just part of this, all part of this same journey. Like, like, and think about the journey as like building blocks like CTC is never gonna not make ourselves responsible for the financial outcome that we agree to with our partners.

That's just it. And a fundamental part of like creating that financial outcome is going to be a large portion of your media investment on, cost control bidding and a really strict financial outcome. What we're doing on the media side is we're looking to expand our toolkit into what else can we. Try and attempt to produce more volume to increase the efficacy of all of our, our bottom of funnel outcomes. never are we going to do that at the expense of the ultimate financial outcome that we've agreed upon with our partners in growth strategy. So I've been saying this thing that I'm not sure how, how popular it is yet.

Like Taylor kind of looks at me sideways when I say it, but, i, I feel like in the, on the media side, we're, we're like the gas pedal. Like we, we wanna put our foot down, we want to go explore, we wanna find pockets of winds through the, through the exploration into, seven day click, one day view in the right cases, mid funnel objectives.

A lot of the stuff that we're doing on YouTube, these are all like gas pedal sort of exploration things. our partners in growth strategy. I don't think break is the, is the right metaphor here, but they're, they're keeping us honest on the media side, right? We, we have a financial obligation to contribute to the business and we have to, we have to do that.

Is all wrapped in the lens of we on the media side want to be, want to be part. We, we can, we have to be the engine of growth. There's no other way. We can't, we can't cut our way to growth. We have to find ways to explore.

[00:49:09] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. that makes sense. So we're, we're a little over time here, so I think we can, we can wrap it up here, but what I usually like to ask. On every podcast is for people who, like, say, aren't a CTC client or aren't part of the ecosystem yet, what's, what is the one thing that you need to do to prep for some of these changes that are coming or to begin to apply some of these these best practices to your own ad account? 

[00:49:33] Delaney Quinn: Yeah. I would say as you prep and you think about this, it can be very different than what you are used to. And I, I go back to one of our very first kind of conversation points we had is having that sequential approach to how you're going to do things and having agreement.

With your brand, how you wanna set up your campaigns, what, what does a OV look like by your products? Who are your audiences? Having all of those hard conversations to get your account structure really, really solid. And then diving into these other pieces of cost controls, looking at attribution windows, talking about testing.

And you gotta do that all from the lens of creative. It is really, really driven by creative and the volume and diversity you can get from what you currently have or partners to get you further.

[00:50:22] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Tony, what do you think?

[00:50:24] Tony Chopp: Just one. I gotta give you just one

[00:50:27] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, let's keep it a one.

[00:50:28] Tony Chopp: incrementality measurement because. Your job. Listen, let me make this really simple. Your job in media is to spend more media dollars than you did the month before or the year before, and you have to generate return on that. And the way that we are finding to do that is with new pathways. To do that is by better understanding.

Incrementality.

[00:51:05] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Cool. well wise words from both of you. Let's we'll, we'll wrap it up here, but we'll, we'll have some of the, the visuals from the deck that Delaney's been sharing with us in the YouTube video. So if you're listening, go check out the YouTube as well to see some of those that'll be helpful. But, until next time. Thanks folks for listening. Thank you Delaney. Thank you Tony for joining us. And we'll see you all next time. Take care.