Listen Now
What do you do when your Meta ads account is on fire? How about when you need more creative? And what do you do when the account is performing too well?
In this episode, Richard chats with Max Rosewater, Senior Paid Social Buyer at CTC, about the key parts of his decision-making process — and, how to translate your forecast into a day-to-day, channel-specific media plan.
Show Notes:
- Elevar is offering 50% off Expert Installation ($1000 value) with the purchase of a subscription (Essentials Plan or above) by Januray 19, 2024*
Please complete this short form to take advantage of the offer.
*Offer available for new Elevar clients only - The Ecommerce Playbook mailbag is open — email us at podcast@commonthreadco.com to ask us any questions you might have about the world of ecomm.
Watch on YouTube
This episode of the E-Commerce Playbook is brought to you by elvar. With over 15 server-side destinations, Elevar gives Shopify brands optimal capture of precise first party conversion data. Get 50% off expert installation by completing the short form linked in the show notes.
[00:00:18] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to the e-Commerce Playbook podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffen, director of Digital Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and I'm joined today, not by Taylor, but by Mr. Max Rosewater, who is a senior paid media buyer here at Common Thread Collective. Max. How are you doing today?
[00:00:34] Max Rosewater: Doing great. Stoked to be on the pod and thanks so much for having me. Excited to talk about some media buying strategy.
[00:00:39] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, no, it's gonna be fantastic. So this is the fourth episode in our five parts series and, and this specific one is about building a channel specific media plan. And so what we're gonna talk with Max about today is, so last week just to recap, we talked a little bit about I. Creative volume and how, and creative strategy and how that's tied to budget expectations. And before that, we talked with Luke a little bit about setting the overall forecast. And then in week one we talked with Taylor about setting an overall business objective. And so as you can see, there's sort of a way that each the, the topic of each week ladders or rather, sort of trickles down into the rest.
So you start with the business objective, then you make a overall business goal based on the overall objective. And then to achieve that goal, there's a number of things you need to do, one of which is, creating the right amount of, or producing the right amount of creative, I guess. then. This fourth tier, what we're gonna talk, talk about today is how you take that overall objective and translate it into specific goals on specific platforms. And so I think the way we're gonna approach this here is like, Max, why don't you kick it off telling us a little bit about a day in the, the life of a media buyer looks like.
What's the first thing you do and like, what, how does that then play into the rest of the decisions you make throughout the day?
[00:01:56] Max Rosewater: Yeah, absolutely. And everything you said is, is totally right and I think this is gonna be like that almost final ladder down, if it makes sense. So every morning I log into my ad account and my growth maps, and what we do is called growth map notes. Essentially we meditate on our ad accounts. See how we're tracking towards our channel specific forecast and then make any necessary adjustments.
Then we most importantly write down our daily notes to show our train of thought at the time to keep a record of those changes made in the ad account. And essentially this allows anybody to go into the growth map and know exactly what's going on at any time for the Facebook media plan. At first I wanna explain how we align on our forecast as media buyers.
'cause I think that'll help align like to the higher level forecast so I can open up the growth map super quick.
So every month our growth strategist completes their cohort specific forecast backing into a high level daily pacing of revenue and A MER expectations. Then, based on those numbers they're provided to us and us buyers need to essentially allocate our spend across all of the different campaigns that we have.
So that spend allocation and a high level ROAS target is the expectation that we need to forecast into the Facebook tracker. So, going into the MER tab real quick. You can see that there is a daily expectation of Facebook spend and overall projected spend for the month, and also an A MER daily expectation that backs into our total sales, right?
So whatever the high level business metric is that the growth strategist is kind of, guiding the team towards, we all need to be aligned on moving that specific metric. So it's my job to ensure that we have a media plan in place that can hit this spend amount and ROAS expectation. Based on our performance expectations.
And this means I need to have visibility into all of our marketing calendar moments and understand exactly when I have the expectation of launching new campaigns throughout the month. So that kind of has us dive straight into the Facebook tracker where you can see while what I was just talking about, our daily notes on a daily basis.
And then we also have a forecasted projected ROAS and a forecasted projected acquisition spend. And this spend amount funnels in from all of our different campaigns that we forecast throughout the month. So we have something also called the concept log, where we closely track all of our new creative concepts that are coming down the pipeline.
We talked about this on one of the previous episodes. So each concept is then forecasted into our spend tracker with a daily budget and ROAS expectation. And me as the buyer, I have to guesstimate, Hey, how much do I think on a daily basis I'll be able to deliver spend through this campaign at the proper efficiency to create a specific net outcome?
Of course, we have to have SKU specific campaigns. Each campaign having a specific product or offer and understand what that net outcome we need from that campaign to get a contribution margin. That's going to be positive of on first order. Of course this can change depending on what you're doing, what your business objective is, but that is our standard setup of course of fully cost controlled ad account.
And because we utilize a fully cost controlled ad account here at CTC. I can't technically know exactly how much I'm going to spend on a daily basis. So when I forecast my campaigns, which you can see here in the growth map, I have to guesstimate how much money I'm gonna spend on a daily basis, which then rolls again into our spend total.
So as a media buyer going into the account also, I need to essentially look at what's happening on an average daily basis from spend and roas, and then try to estimate how much is going to be spent in the future. And that leaves us essentially with only two decisions that you're ever making when looking in the ad account is a media buyer, which is, can I get more volume from a campaign or do I need better efficiency from a campaign?
So to give you a specific example. Imagine I wake up in the morning, I open up my growth map and my ad account, and I come in and see this campaign, the joggers category. And sometimes it's bucketed by campaign. Sometimes it's bucketed by, you know, a category of multiple campaigns that are putting, pushing, spend all into a specific column like this.
So the joggers category here. We had the expectation originally to spend $1,200 a day, then going up scaling up to around $2,800 a day. Now you can see that we've actually been under pacing our expected spend target. On the other hand, our ROAS is actually above target expectation. So what I would do as a media buyer here is say, oh, I actually have room to spend more, there's more volume available here.
And I want to capture that because I essentially wanna be pulling out of low efficiency areas and pushing into high efficiency. If I'm above my ROAS target, that means I can spend more. So I'm gonna essentially go into the account today, and I've written this before. I'm gonna say opening up cost caps.
on The joggers category to gain more spend volume essentially. And you could say like, due to high efficiency, right? So this is a specific example. Obviously I would be a lot more specific if I'm actually like going into the account of what the cost cap is, at, what I'm changing it to, what the daily budget is, and then also making sure that I am changing the forecast, the future forecast to what I think it's gonna spend.
Maybe tomorrow I think it's gonna spend $2,000. So I'll wanna make sure I reforecast that. For as long as I think that's going to happen. And that's important because that will change your projected acquisition spend against your target, and you always wanna make sure that these are matching. So you can see in this scenario I wasn't, I'm not the buyer on this account necessarily, but, so I don't have full context into what's going on, but it looks like we are behind our expected target acquisition spend, as you can see here.
So what we need to do, and, and also you can see that we're actually ahead of our ROAS target, right? So that means that we need to find new places to spend to push more volume. Now on the other flip of the coin, there are situations where we actually need better efficiency. This leggings campaign, we had the expectation of spending around $800 for the first few days, and it looks like the media buyer in this account already made the correct decision where they quickly realized, oh crap, we're not going to be able to deliver $800 a day or even close to that at our target row as expectation we're losing money on this campaign.
So what you need to do is say, Hey, I'm going to go into this campaign leggings campaign. Is inefficient over the past X amount of time. I'm not gonna fully write it out, but over the past X amount of time and I'm tightening up my cost caps in this scenario also, you can see that there's not really much happening here.
I don't see this magically turning around. So you may even say as the media buyer to your creative strategist, Hey, the leggings category is really hurting. We're pulling back on our cost caps, but it's not getting better. It's just trickling out spend and roaz is not improving. What we need to do is introduce new creative concepts into the account to help get that up.
Or simply say, Hey, maybe we're cutting our, our losses on the leggings category, and we're gonna find other areas where we can push that are bore efficient. For example, this Xmi campaign looks like we can also get more volume here since it is above our ROAS target. As we are pacing throughout the month and below, target expectation on spend a lot of opportunity in this campaign as well, being at a 2.17 and actually hitting above spend expectations it seems like.
And yeah, we just need to open cost caps on that, for example. So that's, that's exactly what I do on a daily basis, just checking how can I get more volume or efficiency on what campaigns, making sure we're pushing and pulling into efficiency and making sure that we are on track towards our forecasted spend and ROAS expectations.
[00:09:11] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay, cool. So, I guess I'll ask like break down the decision making process then. Like, so, so the scenario where, let's say you're behind on spend and behind on efficiency as well. Right. So What's the decision making process there for you? And so part of it is probably like order up more creative or whatever, but how do you, how do you get to that point where you sort of realize that that's what needs to be done and then kinda what's the process of making that happen?
[00:09:37] Max Rosewater: Yeah. This is the best thing about the growth map, I think, as a media buyer, is that I think it's one of the only . Things that I've seen as a buyer that really lets you course correct.
You know, it's really difficult when you're in an ad account to have visibility into exactly what's happening and track your net outcome expectation per category or per campaign.
It's so important because you need to make sure as a media buyer that you know, I. That, Hey, this sports bra category needs to hit a specific ROAS target, or we are losing money, right? So I always am looking at it from that perspective of how am I making sure that each category is staying profitable and that we are spending good media dollars, right?
And creating good net outcomes. We have to. Media virus. So it really lets you have clear visibility into how we are pacing against those expected forecasts. And then course correct. It's all about understanding where you're wrong and then fixing essentially it from there. And I think the thought process from there goes into what are my options, you know?
The best situation is where you can simply just open up your cost caps and raise your budget, right? You kind of need to do that. And actually there are usually three specific decisions that I make when using cost controls, and this goes for cost caps and royal as gold bidding is that if you fully deliver your daily budget.
On a daily basis, that means you can maybe actually accept a lower cost control and get better efficiency. So you can consider lowering your cost cap a little bit, raising your budget, and see if it still fully delivers that whole daily budget. I know Andrew Ferris talks about this a lot. I think he would even consider just like raising your budget to like a spend ceiling.
Like whatever you're willing to spend if you wanna raise to like $10,000 a day. And then, you know, as long as you're efficient, keep . Lowering your cap into efficiency right now. If you're fully delivering your daily budget on a daily basis, but you're not hitting efficiency targets, you just need to tighten your cost cap.
Also, on the other hand, if you're not delivering your full daily budget, like you're not getting through all your spend, but you are way above your roas. Or a CPA expectation, that means you can actually open up your cost control. And that's this scenario where I'm actually not delivering the $2,800, but I wish I would have.
That means you can accept a higher bid. You're essentially winning the auction in a way, if you wanna look at it like that. And then I wanna get more volume. Those are the main decisions that I'm making in my head of like, Hey, how can I make, make sure that I'm pushing into the best places. Now the other thing that's actually a more difficult conversation is if nothing is working, you have to be honest with yourself as a buyer.
And we always say this at CTC, you know, not spending or spending bad dollars is just worse than not spending money at all. Essentially. I would rather not open my cost caps if I know that they're not going to hit target. You know, as a media buyer, sometimes you get antsy and you say, oh crap, like we're way behind target spend.
I just simply need to open up. On these bad campaigns and burn money, like I know if I do that, this campaign's not gonna recover. I need to communicate that to my team and be very clear about it and say, Hey, I need to get spend up. I don't have any efficient places to do it. We need more creative, or we're not gonna make it towards our targets.
And then have that conversation from there. And again, that's the exact conversation I talked about of making sure that you can course correct. And so as a media buyer, you're kind of like the intermediary person between your creative strategist and your growth strategist. And understanding, Hey, I think that we can get more of these creatives.
I think they're doing really well in the account. You know, you have the most visibility into what's happening. Out of most any role I would, I would say.
[00:13:05] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that makes sense. So it sounds like this is sort of in, stark contrast to I'd say like a media buying philosophies that like we've had in the past or that maybe people have outside of CTC, but certainly there's like a lot of, I feel like media buying tactics seem to revolve around, okay, quickly build out another campaign with a different audience or something like that, or make small tweaks on the adset level and that's how you're going to sort of regain efficiency or get volume or whatever.
But it sounds like, for us, like that's never the type of decision that we're making. Is that correct?
[00:13:36] Max Rosewater: Is correct. Yeah. And I'm glad you clarified that. When I say build out additional campaigns, I absolutely do not mean start duplicating campaigns like, don't duplicate the campaign that's not working, and use interest targeting and expect it to change. For context, we run a hundred percent cost controlled ad accounts at CTC.
We also use seven day click attribution setting using purchase exclusions. And we call that acquisition campaigns where the only thing we're excluding is purchases. So we let Facebook capture, you know, remarketing conversions within an existing ad, say if it wants to, and that essentially keeps our data as consolidated as possible.
And it really helps, you know, with our structure I think that's truly the best way. I've made some videos about that too. Now. I don't think that lookalike audiences or interest audiences are good investments. And I think about it like that. It's not a good long-term investment if you're trying to find a new winning ad creative.
- It. For example, if I launch one ad across a lookalike audience and an interest audience and a broad audience, first thing, the broad audience is almost a hundred percent of the time going to get the spend and win, right? But even if the lookalike or interest audience for a little bit look better, you are kind of sacrificing the potential efficiency of a better campaign that you could have launched with that same budget.
You're in my eyes, are like wasting budget on things that are, like short term bad investments when you could be launching everything a hundred percent broad targeting and it could potentially appreciate in, in that investment over time. Right. So I think that it's really worth just following Facebook's best practices and going broad and making sure that the algorithm has what they call like the most liquidity to find you that performance.
[00:15:11] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so, so one question that I had then is. Part of it maybe has to, or maybe I'll, I'll expand on my previous question, which is like, so obviously you have had media buying experience in the past. I have, I have some experience with media buying in the past at CTC anyway,
[00:15:31] Max Rosewater: Yeah.
[00:15:32] Richard Gaffin: to me about. What is like the primary contrast between this methodology or this way of thinking about media buying and maybe what you've done before or what you've experienced at other agencies or other brands? yeAh. What, what distinguishes it?
[00:15:47] Max Rosewater: Yeah, a a big distinction is that, Hmm, let me think about it. I would say the biggest distinction is being able to have clear visibility into each of your campaigns. Actual impact on your business in, in the past, we don't have these type of granular tracking, and it may seem overkill, but it, it's really not.
It's actually extremely helpful and necessary to understand what the impact of every campaign is on your ad account. And even if we did dove deeper into stat list our proprietary software, you can actually see your contribution margin outcome per campaign. Which is fantastic. That's, that's something that I would never would have add visibility into before, right?
That's not something you can see in platform. And so in the past it would kind of be guesstimating, you know, a lot of people would say, oh, we have to be consolidated. We always have to run highest volume. And you know, I think every bid strategy has a a place if you truly do need volume, like run, and you don't care about your cost per result, run highest volume.
Like it's not illegal, but at the same time. It will lose you money if you truly have really short or. If you have really slim margins, you are going to quickly lose money by testing into inefficient media dollars by using these bid strategies that Facebook pushes on you as best practice. And frankly, a lot of people say that it just is necessary when it's really not, you know?
I would say that's one of the big distinctions is the actual media buying strategy and having it align so deeply with a financial forecast and outcome. That's like the biggest thing that I would say is different. And of course, making sure that you have SKU specific campaigns and actually like know what your product margins are.
I think in the past some media buyers would blindly be like, we have to be consolidated and then just run everything in like one CBO. When Facebook, if you're running lowest cost, is always going to prioritize the lowest a OV item, so you're going to probably end up burning money on, for example, if you have one product with a $150 a OV in the same campaign as a product with a $50 A OV, Facebook is going to every time prioritize that $50 a OV.
Now, that's not creating the net outcome that you want, and you're probably losing money on that first order.
[00:17:59] Richard Gaffin: Right. so yeah, actually that, that segues nicely then into my. next question, which is those of us and, and I will take a little time out here to say like, if you want us to build process for you, that is something that we can do. All you gotta do is head to common thread code.com, click the hire us button, and express your interest in this implementing the profit system for your own brand.
That is something we can do for you now, however, that's not gonna be for everybody to do. So if we can kind of like summarize the philosophy behind. ad buying here and then turn it into like what is one thing decision that you can make you listening at home can make in the ad account right now at least help get you sort of first step along the way to sort of buying philosophy.
Like what would that be?
[00:18:46] Max Rosewater: I would say make sure that you're merchandising your ad account in the best way possible, meaning you are prioritizing the strongest products from a first order basis, a margin basis, and also an LTV basis. I think that's a really important media buying strategy from the get go is making sure that you're prioritizing things that are gonna make you the most money and that have the most demand, right?
Like you can't really create demand. You kind of have to channel it. So looking at your metrics, understanding which products are the best to push, and then focusing your creative strategy around that and letting the machine learning. You know, teaching the machine, learning how to sell those products in a way I think is really important.
Now also that goes to the merchandising the ad account from a perspective of understanding what your margins are per campaign and ensuring that you have a target per campaign. It in some cases will have like a naming convention structure where I actually put the CPA target that I need at the end of my campaign.
That's a super easy thing that you can do to like, remind yourself and like . Hold it, hold yourself accountable to that target. And you know, if you are torching money again on highest volume consider using a cost controlled ad account structure and see if that improves your margin. Maybe spend will reduce for a little bit, but you are going to be able to fire more bullets, launch more campaigns to then find that winning creative that is going to be the profitable outcome you need rather than torching a bunch of money to get there.
I'd say those. Things in tandem are really like the kind of bread and butter of our, our account strategy and something you can totally do on your own, of course without, without a growth map. However, of course, the growth map makes it super easy and implementing it along with having those targets pulling into stat as well is, is fantastic.
EL of R is proud to sponsor this episode of the E-Commerce Playbook. To maximize the performance of your ad and email campaigns, just add EL of R to your e-commerce tech stack. EL of R empowers Shopify brands with industry leading data tracking. This data is seamlessly sent to the brand's marketing channels, enhancing their performance for higher and lower CAC Elvar session enrichment merges user data with an email or phone number offsite and over time.
Resulting in more emails sent and higher revenue generated. Elvar is offering 50% off expert installation. That's a thousand dollars value with the purchase of an essentials plan or above. By January the 19th of 2024. Follow the link of the show notes to take advantage of the offer. Offer available for new Elvar clients only.
[00:21:13] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Yeah. I think like, maybe just sum, summarize what you're saying. It's like having a finance first of media buying, like starts with thinking about which product makes the most sense to sell. So you're saying like it's volume consideration. Like how much people, how much are people actually buying of this
[00:21:28] Max Rosewater: Yep.
[00:21:29] Richard Gaffin: Is it a favorable a OV or rather a favorable is there a favorable margin on the product?
Do you have room to spend against that? And starting there. And then also building out SKU specific campaigns where you understand that the one thing that you're trying to sell with the campaign is this specific product or set of products at a specific A OV, so that you can set a cost cap against that a OV and make sure that you're getting margin from those. Campaigns. It's like it's not necessarily that simple to actually go out and do that, but I think at least understanding that the product mix in the campaign can't just be arbitrary, which I think a lot of the times it is like, these are our best sellers or whatever. We'll kind of throw whatever into the account and see what sticks. You have to be very sort of judicious about what you choose to put in the campaign.
[00:22:13] Max Rosewater: Absolutely. I think you do. And, and, and this is a important conversation too, to expand on because. In reality, we can't actually control what people buy once they come in through your campaign, right? But we know that, for example, if there's a product that is very attention grabbing, that drives a lot of demand, I would say, you know that that's something that is a hero product to push and it's a really smart thing to do.
Now whether or not they actually purchase that is another thing. So you also need to look at your actual . CPA to a OV ratio. So what is my actual a OV over a seven to 10 day window or the lifetime of my campaign? And then adjusting your cost control based off of that. Because just because you say you wanna sell some shoes, for example, you may not end up selling that shoe and you need to make sure that your cost control is in the right place to adjust towards that a OV expectation, right?
So that's, that's another really important consideration that I think buyers will miss sometimes is blindly having. CPA expectation, like I just said, like holding yourself to it, but then making sure that it is the actual outcome and adjusting your campaigns based on that by looking at kind of your hierarchy of in platform metrics.
Now the other thing that I kind of wanna dive into super quick rich, if you're okay with that,
what we do at CTC, it's really important for a cost controlled ad account. And executing a proper forecast is what we call front loading the ad account. So this is something I typically do at the beginning of the month.
What I mean by front loading is having a ton of fresh ad concepts ready to launch at the beginning of the month. So why is this important? There are actually several reasons why it's very crucial to hitting your forecast. One, not every concept is going to perform or get spend under your cost caps, right?
We can see that here on the leggings, for example. It is not hitting the spend expectation that I thought, right? So you need to have more concepts slated than you think you need to make sure you have enough bullets in the chamber to find the performance that you're gonna. Need to have to hit your forecast Now you wanna make sure that you also can get through the learning phase, and this would be the second point as quickly as possible.
When you first launch a campaign, your CPA is going to be more volatile and your daily budget will be a lot more unpredictable, how much it's spending on a daily basis. The more campaigns that I find the earlier that can gain spend, the better so that I can ramp up those daily budgets and vertically scale the high sufficiency assets in the account that I have while weeding out inefficient or underperforming campaigns.
And this also goes into what we have in the growth map called the previous concepts tab. So you can see we have a ton of different campaigns. Top performers coming over from September, and a ton of different campaigns that we're gonna choose are gonna continue into the next month. We don't know how long those campaigns rolling over are gonna last, so you don't wanna just blindly bet on I. Old performing campaigns that they're going to keep rocking it and keep spending. You need to make sure you have a testing agenda and a really strong you know, concept log full of creative assets to launch when you need to get that spend or efficiency up. Right? And so the third thing is you just don't wanna be scrambling mid month, launching new campaigns, having nothing in your ad account outta the learning phase, giving you stable performance.
That's, that's super important. So. The best thing about the cost controls is you can set your cost cap launch. If it doesn't spend, you just can just launch a whole bunch of campaigns at once. Rather than kind of launching something, burning a bunch of money and like waiting I think it's a really valuable strategy to use to kind of get to the gold fast and make sure that you hit your forecast.
[00:25:40] Richard Gaffin: Right. Yeah, that's, that's been certainly a big lesson for us in it? Which is that like the value of pre-planning, creative, I mean, part of the, the whole reason to, well, part of the reason that we built this forecast to some extent is to give us an understanding of how much creative we're going to need. A few months in the future so that we can get ahead of it. And then when we get in that scenario you're describing where you're behind in a certain way or behind in a meaningful way. Earlier in in the month, you have a number of campaigns that you can pull of, pull from in order to make up that gap.
Because we talk about this a lot, but like first few days of the month, or in many ways, the most crucial because if you get behind middle of the month or. God forbid, towards the end of the month, and you have to
is going to, there's nothing that can really dig you out of that short of a miracle. so because, because you're evaluating your, you know, you're being probably assessed, like if you have a boss, they're probably judging you on your monthly, um, monthly goals and whether or not you're hitting your monthly goals, you only have 30 days to hit them. So you have to make sure, like the first five days go really well in order to make sure that the next 25 days go well as well.
[00:26:49] Max Rosewater: Totally. Yeah. And I actually have a example of doing this this month of, like, the beginning of the month was really rough after Black Friday for one of our large brands. And we were spending like around four KA day and needed to ramp up into like 17 KA day by mid month. And I was just like, okay, nothing is working right now.
Coming outta Black Friday, we were in a full on like sale hangover as we call it. And I was kind of, struggling to figure out, Hey, how are we gonna get efficiency up mid month? I really need to figure this out. And I launched a ton of new creative assets, pulled in a bunch of Dabas, doing daba frames, daba with title card.
It kind of threw a bunch of stuff at the wall, just exactly like I said, of course, using, you know, good strategy. We used like shipping cutoff messaging to make it relevant to the upcoming shipping cutoff, and that actually completely lit up the account. I found one campaign that I wouldn't have launched otherwise.
It wasn't even slated in the concept log. It was just something on a win that I was like, I need to get something out there that's gonna work and it's now spending like four KA day way above our target efficiency. I could probably scale it even more, and that's like the goal that . For example, if you're thinking about account consolidation, I think I even made a tweet about this the other day.
It's account consolidation is truly just that you need to have a certain daily budget. You know, your daily budget formula, your CPA times 50 divided by seven. What daily budget do you need to get an ad set out of the learning phase? Right? That's consolidation. I don't care how many campaigns you have in an ad account, as long as it has the daily budget that it needs to get learnings, then that's totally fine to have more than one campaign.
Right. So I, if I hadn't launched all those new campaigns, we probably wouldn't have made our, our forecast mid month. But now because we front loaded the ad account, because we were proactive in how we were seeing things trend, we were able to recover very well. And now we're way above our targets because we took the an extra initiative to launch those extra.
Campaigns, I always say have more bullets in the chamber than you need. It's, it's the best.
[00:28:47] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that makes sense. ANything I think that kind of like covers what we need to talk about today. But is there anything else that you wanna hit? Any other, any final words of advice for the folks out there?
[00:28:57] Max Rosewater: I would say if I'm leaving it off on one note, make sure that you really understand the true impact of each campaign that you have in your ad account, and it's. Correlation to whatever your financial outcome is and that your team is aligned on a specific one. I think a MER is like a really great one that you can make decisions on and always follow the hierarchy of metrics.
As a media buyer when you're going into your ad account, make sure that you're looking at the high level business objective first before going and making decisions in your ad account. 'cause for example, you may want to accept a lower return on ad spend. If you're way above your A MER expectation, and if you don't look at your actual financial outcomes first, before you go and make decisions in your ad account, you can get bogged down by in platform metrics, which frankly are more directional like data points than they are the source of truth, right?
Your Facebook ROAS doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually hitting your, your financial targets, right? Your Facebook re could be high and your A MER could be below target or your, your A MER can be above target and your Facebook re can look like crap. It happens all the time. So you need, as a, as a media buyer, you need to make sure that you are having those conversations with your team and not just blindly looking and making decisions fully in your ad account.
[00:30:13] Richard Gaffin: Cool. That's right. Financial literacy for everybody. That's, that's sort of, been our watchword at
[00:30:17] Max Rosewater: Absolutely.
[00:30:17] Richard Gaffin: for a while, but, right, Max, appreciate you joining us. Thanks for walking us through this and for all the fine folks out there. If you are looking for us to implement this for you, I'll just repeat again, just head over to our site, common Thread Co. com click the hire us button and let us know you're interested in implementing the profit system for your own brand. And we're happy to put that in place for you. but in the meantime, Max, appreciate you joining us and we'll see everyone next week.
[00:30:42] Max Rosewater: Of course. Thanks for having me, y'all.