Getting Sales Without Tons of New Content: How the Facebook Ad Algorithm Actually Works
Hey all, it's me again. I've been taking some time to prove out a hefty hypothesis I have about solving the problem everyone wants to solve: getting sales from Meta ads without uploading 30 new creatives a week.
Because let's be real — there is no way your ad "fatigued" after 10,000 impressions or a 3x frequency. Most people can't even tell you what the topics of the ads in their feed were yesterday. Neither can I.
I've spent multiple 7 figures on trying to find out the answer to this question, and it's pretty clear right now.
The secret comes down to controlling what events you optimize for.
I'll break this down in 3 parts so everything makes sense.
1. How Meta says to run your ads:
Meta often says to optimize your ads for events you can easily get, such as adds to cart or content views. Along with that, they often recommend running brand awareness ads and traffic ads to warm up new potential customers. They recommend you move people through the funnel stages of awareness, consideration, and decision.
The problem with this approach: Brand awareness ads and traffic ads bring traffic that is vastly under-willing and unlikely to take the actions you want. Even if it's the right idea, brand awareness and traffic campaigns don't pay off in a short enough term to make it worth it to run them.
2. How Meta ads gurus say to run your ads:
The conventional wisdom among most popular Meta gurus is to run sales/conversions campaigns optimized for your purchase event. They recommend you stay away from all brand awareness and traffic campaigns and stick to campaigns optimized for purchase.
The problem with this approach: As you've probably noticed yourself too, these campaigns work - but CPMs can get expensive and ads frequently burn out, increasing your demand for content to keep testing.
- What I've noticed, tested, and seen consistent success with:
The algorithm is based on machine learning, which means repetition is its oxygen. It gets much better at getting a result if it can get many of them.
The algorithm targets people based on their likelihood to take the action/event you optimize for. It uses many, many signals, but one of them is other actions/events that the person has taken recently. For example: if you buy sneakers, you'll begin to get a ton of new ads for sneakers soon. Try this out, you'll see. You'll get subtle increases in ads if you view a sneaker online, then you'll get more if you add to cart, but the vast majority of new ads you'll get will come after you've purchased a pair of sneakers. Why? Because on paper, the likeliest person to buy a pair of sneakers (or closely related products) is someone who just bought one. The likelihood is virtually 100%.
Now, what does that have to do with you?
If you're running purchase ads, you're likely getting people very late in the buying process. You're targeting people who are getting lots of other ads just like yours, which is why your CPMs are high.
So, what do you do?
Split your budget between other, slightly upper-funnel events. The people your ads go to if you target an add to cart, initiate checkout, or even a content view are people who are still interested in your product but are earlier in the buying cycle. There's less competition, lower CPMs, and these people move through the funnel moderately quickly.
Why do this?
The feeds your ads will land on will be for people looking around, exploring products like yours, and trying to figure out what they want to buy, as opposed to people who have already nearly decided on another product or have already bought it.
Then why do purchase campaigns work?
First off, purchase campaigns don't *only* go after people who are in the later stages of the buying journey. Some of the people your purchase ads go to are earlier in the journey and are being warmed up by your purchase campaign. When they eventually do get warmed up, they buy. That's fine, but you'd have overpaid for those impressions with CPMs that didn't have to be that high. Plus, many of them don't work - people have duplicated campaigns all over the place. If you look at the Crazy Method, you see tons of campaigns all over, and it makes sense - you're essentially warming up a minority of the people your ads run to for a premium price. To top it off, many purchase campaigns have big scaling issues - as soon as you raise the budget, results fall off. It's because you've been burning through buyers and it often can't find enough new people to match the new budget you have.
How does this line up with how Meta targeting works today?
Pretty well. Meta generally knows (for the most part) who is likely to buy, sign up, or take other actions for your brand and it gets better when it gets to see the action get taken. There's generally not much need left for interest targeting or lookalike targeting, except in the earliest stages of getting your ads up and running. So, your concern should be making your ads are good (of course), getting them in front of people at roughly the right times, and making sure your landing page and post-ad experience is good. Meta can generally handle the rest.
Here's how this strategy generally looks:
Campaign 1: ASC or CBO, ad sets optimized for add to cart
Campaign 2: ASC or CBO, ad sets optimized for initiate checkout
Campaign 3: ASC or CBO, ad sets optimized for purchase
Each campaign will target people suitable for each stage. The Add to cart campaign will find people who want to learn about the product, and it'll get better at targeting interested people based on whether they add to cart or not. This teaches the algorithm who is expressing desire for your product, without necessarily buying it. Contrary to popular belief, most people are not impulse buyers.
The initiate checkout and purchase campaigns will target many of the folks who added to cart from campaign 1, and will get initiate checkouts and purchases at a much cheaper rate.
How should I control budget?
Half should be on purchase, half on the other upper-funnel actions mainly because of the CPM differences. Test and see what works for you.
How should I scale?
Scale by 10-20% daily if you can, or go at your own speed. I've noticed this setup does not have the scaling issues that other setups have, because you're essentially generating your own buyers instead of suddenly raising the budget and demanding the algorithm find you more people willing to buy from you right away.
TL;DR: Run campaigns aimed at events you get more often in order to lead potential new buyers into purchasing from you. Spamming purchase campaigns is something Meta does not recommend for a reason - you end up paying high CPMs, having scaling issues, and having to test 50 ads a week to get consistent results as your CAC rises steadily.
I'll try my best to answer all questions. :)