Real Meta Ad Account Breakdown: Fixing Zollie's Declining Spend

This is an episode of The Interferers Podcast, unlike anything I've done for a long time. Sarah Resnick from The Brand Zali, which she will explain more in a minute, reached out to me and asked if I could look at her ad account. She said, "Hey, we've gone way backwards in spend. I'm trying to understand what happened. Can you audit it in some way?" And if you do, you can show all of it to your audience on The Interferers Podcast. So you can watch this episode, and you see the actual ad account that Sarah and her brand have, and I went through it live, audited the account, and tried to figure out why her spend had gone backwards so far. What she could do to move it back forward, is she have a structural problem, a media buying problem, did she have a creative problem? Is there something broken in her meta account? What is going on in her ad account? And in that, I show her actual ad account. I show exactly how I audit an ad account, look for problems like this, and went through the whole problem solution setup. Sarah's on the call with me, so she can answer some of my questions along the way and fill me in on some of the gaps in the brand. And even show her Shopify account, to show her revenues phased with her ad account, just a really close look at a real ad account to look at, where does she need to go? And by the end, I was convinced that Sarah has a real opportunity on her hands to push her business forward, and it's in some surprising ways, relative to what she came to be with. I think this episode is going to be very helpful for you. You probably want to watch this on video. I'm going to publish it in an audio. I tried to talk through everything I was doing as I was doing it. But this is one of those ones where videos probably best. Let's get into a Sarah resident resident from Zolly, actually auditing her ad account live, me showing you the entire process. I look out to figure out if something's broken or what she needs to do. Let's do it. Hello, Sarah. - Hi, Andrew. I'm good. Thanks for having me on. - Good, yes. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for being willing to show your ad account to the people. People love content like this, where you actually break down what's actually happening. And like I said in the intro, which you heard me record, I'm nervous about this. I like, it's funny. I have a process that I use for this sort of thing all the time and I'm going to show people how I would approach this problem in general. But still, I like, hopefully we'll be some help. We'll see. - I think it will. I appreciate getting to come on and I love listening to your content and it has helped a lot as I have worked on the businesses. - Thank you. Okay, let's do a couple of things in advance. And my hope is that basically we can give people a little context for both what the business is and what the problem is. People who might have heard you before a long time ago might opening the books episode with you might know your business, but it's been a little while. So let's give, tell people about what Zali is. And then my basic plan here is, I'm going to work live, show you what I'm doing, talk out loud and ask you context questions along the way, the kind of things that I would want to know. So we'll see how this goes. But tell people about Zali, Sarah, and what the business is, and what palette scout is and all that. - Sure. So Zali makes playful color tools to inspire makers and help people choose colors confidently. So this is palette scout. This is our hero product. We launched it about a year and a half ago. And it's a deck of 180 colors and it teaches people to mix and match them into pleasing color palettes, using color theory, but you don't have to know color theory to be able to use it. So I also own a yarn company and in that line of work, really find that people struggle with confidence in choosing colors. And so that is what inspired us to create this product. We also have like companion deck, the toolkit that we launched in the fall of last year and that has challenge cards and teaches people more deeply about color theory. We have the companion sticker pack and we have a lot of digital products that go along to enhance people's learning. And that is relevant because a lot of what we're selling is bundles of digital and visible products together. So that's a lot about how we think about driving revenue in our company. So that's what we do at Zali. - Amazing. And okay, and so now give me a little bit more context about the ad account problems that you have had. This is just to give people a sense of how I'm thinking about this, almost anytime anybody comes to me and says like, "Hey, Andrew, I'm interested in having you work on the business, consult with me, be an AJF growth client, whatever it is." The first question I ask is, I basically ask them, give me a sense of the revenue of the business and Sarah, you can be as clear as vague as possible. And the point of the question is to get some context for how the business is overall doing, where it's spend as that. And it will also trigger for me a sense of what kind of resources you have available towards things like creative when we get to that point. So understanding kind of where your revenue is at tends to tell me a little bit about kind of the state of the business, more than anything else. And then give me also the TT and like, trail into a month ad spend generally and maybe more specifically the challenges you are trying to solve and the reason you sort of contacted me about this. So that kind of context will be really helpful. And anytime I'm ever looking at an ad account, I always know this stuff going in before I ever look because you just can't really help somebody if you don't know where they've been and where they're trying to get to. So give me some of that stuff. So last year we did $730,000 of gross revenue. We spent $327,000 on advertising. That's all on meta. Our net margins before, our gross profit before advertising is 73%. So we have pretty strong margin structure with digital, is that landed to the customer or is that before you ship it? Yeah, landed to the customer. So including all three of us. Yeah, because we sell a mix of digital and physical products. So I think I'm really happy with the gross profit numbers and I would say that the contribution profit of 28% after advertising is something that we need to work on. Okay. We had, you asked for trailing 12 months. I don't have that, but we spent $327 in 2025 and then in 2020, for Q1, 2026, we spent on advertising 61,000. So like our ad spend has gone way down. So that is why I reached out to you. Say those numbers again. So last year, we spent on advertising for Zali, 327,000. Yeah. So in four quarters, almost all of that was in Q4. So we spent 184 in Q4 and we spent 40 to 60, the other, sorry. Yes, 40 to 60, the other quarters. And then in Q1 of this year, we spent 60,000 again. So we are, you know, like Q4. So obviously we're going to spend more, but we were spending $5,000, $6,000 a day for like a good part of December and the end of November. And we have now been back to spending like $1 to $300 a day. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so like way, way down. And we like, I know that there's some seasonality to this, but I don't believe that it should be that much. Like I think that we can be having a higher spend on meta. We are seeing like really high sell through for this product in like art supply stores and wholesale stores. We have great reviews like I think that this product, I know that this product resonates with people and I'm curious if there are changes that we should make to how we're thinking about creative and how we're thinking about add account structure to do that. Yeah, okay. So let me just tell you what goes through my mind when I hear all that. The first is you're at a very hard stage of business because you have, well, first of all, it's elite gross margins. So that's the very first thing I think, which is great. The digital component of it is so beautiful. It makes inventory management fantastic. And it gets great. Secondly, yeah, so the margin thing is a really, really awesome win. And secondly, you're still at a really hard stage of business because whatever the answer to this is, there's just no way you are just sitting on boat loads of cash resources to go solve all these problems. Like I think that's sort of like 500K to 3 million or something like that is a really tough stage of business because you're growing and getting more ability to grow with ads and things like that. And it's starting to open up. The problem is you still have to kind of do everything yourself. Like it's just really hard to find great resourcing to do that. So I'll be curious how that keeps developing. So that's just the first thing that goes into my mind. The second thing is, when I hear the ad spend numbers you're talking about, my initial immediate reaction is that you have like insane seasonality, which I think is actually very possible in this business that you function like a borderline Christmas tree business, you know what I mean? Or it's like super, super holiday oriented. I think that's probably a little unlikely. And I'm actually surprised because we're recording this on May 11th. I'm actually surprised to hear that it didn't pick up just from Mother's Day a little bit. It's not like a perfect Mother's Day gift, you know? But there's sometimes a moment like that that if you're seeing those low spend levels over those, even those weeks, I can imagine it being something that for the maker type mom that this could be a really cool thing. Yeah, it's not quite, I don't hear it the wrong way. It's not quite like sweet enough to be like a true, true Mother's Day gift, I think. But that's another thing that occurs to me. Either way, you're spend now and in holiday needs to go up. And so whether or not, even if we come out of this audit and say, "Yeah, you know, it's actually nothing, Ron." I structure wise or whatever, you just are super seasonal. I would still say, "But you can't be so seasonal that you can only spend $100 or $300 a day." Yeah. Like there's, even if there's nothing like, quote unquote, "Rom," even if I open your ad account and it's perfect structurally, I will say, well, we still have to solve the problem, which is how do you grow this business with ads, you know? So let me just say two things to that. First of all, we did spend $1,000 yesterday on Mother's Day. - We were not running any particular creative related to Mother's Day. So I think we have seen it go up a bit. I don't know if it's related to that. We just keep putting in new creative. So, and then the other thing related to the resources. So I think it's definitely true related to this size of the company. But what we have going for us is that we are a sister brand. So I have another company that I started nine years ago. It's the same team that's running both. And so I have more resources. I think that most people would at that sort of contribution revenue and really, really smart creative people that are going to. - I was just going to say, also, because you're selling art type things, I bet you are swimming in creative and clever people for making cool stuff on the internet. - Absolutely, yeah. - That's awesome. Okay, all right. Let's pull up the out of count and see what we can get to. I don't know. I may build some reports live. I don't know. He said, I actually fully feel nervous about this. This is funny. - All right. - But I promise I have not looked at this at all. - I literally shared it an hour and a half ago, so. - Yeah, yeah. Well, you first gave me, we talked about the out of count before, and I was like, I won't look at it until, because I want people to see kind of how I'm thinking about this problem. All right. Let's look at this out of count. All right. I have here the Zelli out of count. I'm going to zoom in a little bit on it. The very first thing I'm actually going to do is, I'm going to, I'm going to get my columns right. And this is so obvious when you think about it, but the basic dropdown columns are not the columns that I would actually use. I have a string, I'm actually going to share my screen for this as well. I have a pre-safed, oh, can you see this? Oh, great, I can't. Great. I have a pre-safed column set here, and anybody who's looking at this can also see that I have in this, some media, some tactics, just kind of pre-built into my own audit template. This is AJF OS, by the way. This is like our custom operating system for our agency that Patrick, my business partner, not co-founder, but business partner built, which is pretty cool. So a little look in there. And then I'm going to take copy that string, and I'm going to paste it right here in the URL string. So I'm just going to, if you look there, you can see like I found the part where it says and columns right here. I'm just going to grab that whole thing, paste over it, and now we've got my column set up. And that is a really convenient. I put those, my columns, if you want them, that URL string that I have there. I'm putting it in the show notes for this episode. So if nothing else, you can have my columns. It'll be at the very bottom. You can copy and paste that same thing. It's exactly what I'm looking at. The one thing that's not in there that I need to add to it is I'm going to actually add the one-day engagement attribution to this as well. And the reason for that is that very recently, mid-March, Meta updated, as people know, updated their click attribution settings to where now engaged conversions is a separate column where it's used to be the case that if you did click attribution, if somebody clicked on your ad and they were clicking over to your Instagram profile or something, so they weren't actually clicking through the ad or clicking to a different place, or if they shared the ad or commented on or something like that, those things would all count as a click on the ad. And so therefore, they would count as click attributed purchases. They changed that. No, those are not called engagements. And so engaged through conversions are a separate thing. And it does change that we've got to think about attribution just a little bit. So Sarah, were you familiar with that before I just mentioned all that? It got mostly around, I think, but yeah. Yes, I was. And you'll see as you get into our ad sets, but the most recent ad sets that I've been working on, I changed our settings to include, engage through, or the one day, even before I didn't. So that is, I haven't reset and rebuilt everything 'cause a little nervous to turn off things that have what's called that are working. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, yes, we since April have been using them. Okay, yes, thank you, Sarah. Okay, I'm glad to hear that that news had gotten to you. The, I figure as much you were nodding along as I was saying that, but just to get people to know, it is a big deal, actually. It changed the way you're reporting works a bunch. It's going to actually screw up our historical reporting a little bit. It's annoying to me. I understand what I did, but it's annoying. Okay, the other thing I'm going to do really fast, by the way, is I'm going to save this. Okay, I'm going to just call this, save this as Zali right here. I'm going to save this view of things so that we have it kind of at any given time. All right. So now we've got our column set and all that. So let's look, we're starting off last 30 days. And as far as what my column set is, by the way, I'm going to look last 30 and just see, before I even look at any campaigns, just to show you how I'm thinking about this. I just moved from left to right, from on the hierarchy of metrics. So spend revenue conversion data by click. I just want to eliminate any sort of view conversion that's mixed in there. And then, and then you've got all your purchases with different types of purchases there. One of the things I'm going to notice here, I've got a CPA at Average Purchases Conversion Value, that's AOV basically. One thing I'm just going to make a little mental note over right now is you're looking at roughly an $80 AOV. Sarah, while we're talking that, what is included in that $80, $72 to $80 here? Like what products do you mean? Yeah, yeah, what is made up in there, yeah. Yeah, so the core deck that we sell is a $30 price point. We use most customers by both of these together. And then they'll buy some bundle of other digital products to go with it, and they'll pay $10 for shipping. Interesting. OK, OK, great. That is good to know. So that's a lot of customers are buying more than just the core deck. The reason I asked is that, given what pal's got is, it was higher than I expected the AOV to be, which I think is an interesting thing. Yeah, so it might be helpful for you to take a look at our landing pages and see how we're structuring bundles. But this is entirely a bundle driven business. For sure, will. OK, so let's look at a couple of other things here. The other thing that's going to jump off fish me right away is the frequency is pretty high for the last 30 days, given how low your spend is. And this actually gets into something I've put out some recent episodes about, which is the notion of CPMR, the idea of cost to reach 1,000 people, not just cost per 1,000 impressions, but actually reaching people. At your spend level, you're paying a lot to reach these people. And my guess is that that's for two reasons. One of them is that you are kind of a nichey product to begin with. And I think one of the questions inherently in this business-- and this is something I know from talking to you before-- is that you are-- I mean, you're selling yarn in another business. I remember you describing that business to me at the time as a business that was really for a nichey creator. Like yarn people, they have to be a weavers, right? You're selling to weavers. Yeah. So weavers are going to be like, you're pretty deep if you're a weaver, right? Like it's more of a niche kind of craftiness and in-creatorness. I don't-- craft might even not be the right word. And I apologize if I-- it's not. Oh, good, yeah. Yeah, OK. And so what I'm wondering is if Palette Scout is immediately hitting the same thing where it's really appealing not to a super broad audience of creators, which I think is probably what you want to appeal to. Like, almost anybody being creative, but it's actually appealing to a sort of nichey, super creator like really, really enthusiast kind of person. Do you have any thoughts about that? Yeah. So it's definitely true that weavering, which is my other business, is a small industry. But with Palette Scout, where we see quilters buying this, which is a huge industry of hobbyist quilters, we see knitters, interior designers, there's a much wider range of people that we see in our post-purchase surveys are buying them. So for context, I was at an industry trade show last week of yarn and fabric wholesale businesses, and there were 700 businesses exhibiting wholesale. So I think it's a big industry. There's a lot of makers, yeah. Yeah, so makers, I kept trying to find that word to say I'm going to keep saying creators. Makers is the word I was looking for. Makers, I'm aware that makers is a huge industry. What I'm wondering is if at least it's currently constitutive, Zolley's really appealing to a narrow group within that larger group. And in some ways, I see the vision for this product. It feels to me like a product that should reach pretty far and wide, really helpful. But yeah. No, I think that's a really good point. Yeah, and like clearly so far, I think we're getting people that are more, except for potentially in Q4, where it's more like, oh, that seems like a good gift for a maker. I think the people that we're getting the rest of the year are probably much more deep into their craft than like a general crafter. So I think it's possible and something that we could work on. Yeah. Yeah, so my take on CPMR as I put it in recent episodes, and some people can go back and listen to those. There's a few of them that I've done. This would be episodes from early May. You'll see me talk about a couple of these things. But my take on it is that it's almost over, almost entirely, I don't know. It's overwhelmingly a creative issue at this stage, which is to say, creative is targeting in meta. And so if you're reaching the same people and over and over again, my immediate instinct here is that you're not speaking to enough people clearly enough for meta to extend the reach of your ads, which is both a, which means reach is a symptom of a core creative problem. And therefore reach is actually just another way of referring to a problem of performance. It's like saying exactly what you said to me, start this thing, which is we're not spending enough money and we can't seem to spend more money. That's one way of approaching that problem is that it's a ghost in the machine. problem with meta that meta is sort of like doing something wrong at the level of signal. But I think that's rare and that it mostly only happens for very large brands who are working across very different categories, things like that. I think that actually most times this is solved by speaking to more people, more specifically and directly. Actually, you just set a few of them, which is like quilter might approach this product. Now, I have not looked at any of the ads yet, so I have no idea what your ads actually look like. Literally, I have no idea. So, you might be like, "Oh, we've done that," but when I hear quilter might be really thinking about this different than weaver, then interior designer, and thinking about how that person, how those different people are going to interact with this product differently, I think it could be, it's just a little thing I want to flag as I can think here, okay? All right. So, let's use my little template here and look at a few things. So, manual bids, does it leverage manual bids? Actually, I'm jumping ahead of myself. The next thing I want to do is understand a little bit more of the actual spend for this account. So, what I'm going to do next is I'm going to quickly throw together some ad supporting here to see if I can get my head around really the true element of this. All right. So, I'm building this report. I'm going to just call this a Zali monthly ad spend, and I'm going to pull up the Zali account here. Create this report. And I'm going to do something that is crazy annoying to do live, and I'm going to get rid of literally every column for a minute here. And there's probably somebody please comment on this episode and tell me if I'm doing this in dumb way because I have to do this all the time, and it is crazy annoying. So, okay, we're going to do that, amount spent, we're going to go grab a monthly breakdown of the amount spent. And I'm going to get purchase conversion value as well, take this, and then I also want an attribution setting that I want, which is going to be 28 to click, there's going to be some annoyances with that with recent attribution changes, but it'll work. And then I'm going to go through, let's do a two year look back for now. I don't even know if you guys were advertising this because I don't remember when we first talked about it. I remember when we first talked when you were about to release this product, Sarah, but you know, I think it would be most helpful. We were advertising products that were not pallet scale before, so do you want to start with looking at pallet scale? Okay, well, yes, when did the pallet scale start? That would be like August, not last summer, but this summer before. So August, 2024. Okay, so great, we'll go to August 24, so we didn't overshoot it by too much, but here we go. All right, so the thing that jumps off this page when you look at it right away is exactly what you said, which is that in December, you guys spent $141,000, whereas the rest of these months, you just really have nowhere anywhere close to that. I think it's actually fascinating that you even think of this as sort of like a quote-unquote recent problem at and anyway, it looks to me like, in fact, this has kind of gone on for a little while, although you were better back, oh, that's December, what about January 2025? This is an interesting time period to look at October of last year. You definitely were spending more over these time periods, and the return is pretty similar. You're looking at like a one and a half row, ask something like that. And actually, yeah, it's actually been worse recently, huh? March. Yeah, that's why we stopped. March, April, it's worse. Yes, I see that. I'm going to do this really fast as well while I'm doing a little export here and some of that, can you talk more about on those older time periods, like let's say October 2025, and let's say February 2025, was that pretty much all pallets go out? Yeah, so this business is entirely driven by pallets go out and the related products. And we launched this, we brought our AOV up $10 when we launched the toolkit in October of 2025. So I, and then we launched another sticker pack, like another physical product in March. So we should be like our AOV should be up higher that we should be doing better. And so a lot of last year, we were like, we're brand new, we're focusing on building out new products so that we can grow this. And I think we now have a wide enough, like line of things to put into bundles that we should be able to be spending more and performing more. Okay. Oh, that's too far back. But I'm interested in your insights, I mean, my other business is not seasonal like this at all and is also not at all driven by meta. So I, I don't really have like a frame of reference of whether this is no common. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think, I mean, my immediate thought here right away is like, you need to start planning for holiday sooner than later. Like what I mean is like, assume that you're going to hit, when that happened, in fact, did you run out of inventory like because it's such a stark thing, it jumped off the page so much that you did so much money then, like, how did that hit you relative to your expectations? I mean, that was way higher than I expected we would do. And we did, we didn't run out of inventory in December, but we ran out in January. So that's the other thing. Like the last couple of months, we restocked in March of our companion deck, um, but we, I think we lost a lot of the momentum that we had from December, um, when we stopped of that product, because then our A O V went down, but $10. Okay. Um, that's interesting. Yeah. So wait, say that last part again. So you had, sorry, I was trying to do two things at once, talking to you at the same time. So, so you, uh, you ran out of inventory, you said, uh, in December, we were fine in December, but we ran out of our companion deck, which is what we co-market it with, which raises our A O V. Um, and also people were just kind of hanging around waiting for that to be back in stock, and that did not come back in stock until the end of March. So I thought we would start to do better in April once we had this in stock. Um, yeah, but we have a helpful note. I'm actually going to do something really fast here, which is I'm going to re-export this data one more time with purchases so I can see if I see that A O V thing. This is one of those things that is helpful. Like if I was doing all my audits while talking to somebody, those are the little context things that show up. Uh, I probably would have instituted that you were going to run out of inventory either way, because you just can't go as big as you went relative to where you were with no history of it and not run out of inventory, you know, like that, this 141 is just so massive ultimately else that there's no way you were predicting it. But again, I will flag right away, um, like if you're doing six acts, your October/November spend in December, that tells you something about your customers, at least as it currently is sort of constituted, right? It's a, it definitely means something about the business. So yeah. Yeah, and we're right now. I mean, we need to make our inventory plans by the end of May for Q4, so we are trying to figure out right now how much to buy for this year. You, is that because you're, that's how much time you have to give your manufacturer? Yeah. Yeah. That's a long time. It is a long time. But I also don't think we would necessarily have more, given the history here, I don't think we're going to have more information by August or September, because so far we've been so seasonal. But anyway, it's, it's, it's where we're at. Okay. Um, okay. I'm going to just make sure, I'm going to pull May so far as well, just so I have it. It looks like it's maybe a little better in May. It is? Yeah, we've been doing better in May. That's great. And let's see, a hundred, let's see how many purchases a, a hundred and nine. Uh, there. Okay, yeah. So there's the, there's the AOV thing right here, right? Which is that you're out of it, January, February, March. So, okay. So that's one of the problems. My creative team at AJF Growth is staffed basically entirely, not basically entirely, through the good people at behind the scenes studio, BTS studio behind the scenes studio is a Philippines-based creative meta ads focused agency that the whole thing they do is they make ads. There's artists, creative strategists who make ads so that you can extend your team with great quality designers and editors who are, who are really first and foremost thinking about how to make a high volume of high quality, highly diverse creative, the kind of stuff that I preach all the time. The reason they are doing the kinds of things that I preach all the time is because there's, they're really kind of a little sister company of AJF Growth in a lot of ways. They are hearing things that I'm doing. They're seeing what we're doing with our clients and putting those things into practice. And they actually supply my creative team. So I'm really tight with these people. I'm a really big fan of what they're doing. You should consider using them for your creative team as well. If you need to extend your team, you have a good sense of where trying to go as a brand and you need more creative firepower to add to your account, you should go to BTSStudio.co, get on the phone with them, see if their solutions are right for you. BTSStudio.co to get more and better meta ads creative and you're out of account at a reasonable price. All right. So one of the things that for sure happened here is that your AOV going down really hurts you. Yeah. It just hurt volume a lot. But hey, at the same time, that it still doesn't really explain everything. Because if I look, actually let's not do, yeah, if I look at what's happening here, I'm going to notice that like in October, for example, your AOV, oh no, it was way up. That's what we launched the product. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But still back here, your AOV was fine. It was lower. 60 or 56 dollars. It was lower. Yeah. And yet you weren't there. But you can see the recovery in the row as like right here and you need to spend a little bit more. But okay, that's, that's good to know. All right. That gives me some sense of the business. I could pull up a bunch of other data about your business right now, but what I end up doing. doing is just for anybody watching us is that I end up using this sheet for a whole lot of different stuff. I'll just use a simple way to get my head around core metrics like total revenue, new customer, return customer. One thing I might be looking for at some point is the question around like, is my ad spend actually producing more or less revenue than meta says? So that's why I like like to have new customer revenue in here, return customer revenue in here, just to see kind of what's really going on in the business. I don't know why these. Yeah, and I can share that with you if that would be helpful because it's, you know, and that we're not running in a.74. Yeah, well, that's what that was my question. But we are, and which sort of is also why I wonder if we're having like a technical issue. I mean, I'm very glad you're auditing our account, but I have realized that between 1.8 and 2.2 and it is consistently like saying that this is where it's delivered at, but revenue is high. Let's do it. Let's, let me show you exactly how I would answer this question because I was able to do it right now. So this is a report that I put into nearly every, nearly every brand that I work on. Let's say new customer, new versus returning customers. Some of you new customer sales over time. I'm going to take this from the same time period that I had last year, grab it starting in January, go through yesterday. By the way, recordings on May 11th, like I said. So at, if we assume that, yeah, you're on pace for about 20 grand in May and spend right now, which is a real recovery from where you were. And so that's a lot because of the stock issue, huh? Because because of being out of stock on an issue. I think so, although if we were back in stock all of April, like, would it make sense that it would take us that long to recover? I don't know. That's tricky. I'll have to look at it. We were talking to March. Yeah. All right. So what I'm going to do is go is not none on this get rid of the comparison. And the first thing I'm going to actually do here to make my life easier is I'm going to hit actually. I'm going to show you exactly how I do this. Okay, we're going to get rid of customers from this report. We're going to do growth sales. The problem with using total sales is that it is a metric that doesn't actually tell you that the true, oops, the true revenue that you're getting. Total sales includes taxes. And taxes are not revenue. You don't ever see that money that money goes to the government. So, so what we actually want to do is get to find out the true amount of money that is made it into your actual bank account. And so I like to build this report like this. So now what I've done is I've got no new or returning customer or no nuns. Nobody who's marked those none, new or returning customer in the business. I've got this by month over a longer period of time. I have new returning customer separate. By the way, one of the things all sort of flag right here is that your returning customer level is very revenue is very low, which is not super surprising. I think there's some questions about the total business there. I expected that, but this is pretty low. So you have to really make all your money on first purchase in this business. Okay. And then what I'm going to do is save this as and we'll just call it Ferris new versus returning customer sales. I believe that's save for you. You can use it however you want. There's my name in your in your analytics. You know, just a little reminder that we had this call sometime. Okay. And I'm going to do the same thing here. So I'm going to export this. Somebody is mad at me again right now because there's probably some fancy way to do this with clot or something like that. But I'm not that fancy. So here we go. All right. So so here's the export that I have. I've gone and just sorted this out like this. What I'm actually going to do is I don't actually do this order count right now really. So I'm just going to use this as a way to sum up these three columns because what I actually need is that is gross sales plus shipping minus discounts. That's going to tell me the actual amount of revenue that we received month over month every single month separated by new returning customers. Sarah, one question I have right away is there's very, very little in the way of discounts here. Do you just count at all? We do bundles that have like a value-based discount, but I think the way that they app that we, I'm not sure if they're all pushing in as a discount for Shopify. Okay. Yeah. But no, we don't do sale like we don't email our list and say we have a sale basically except in Q4. So why not? Well, I mean, as you noticed, we're like almost all new customers. So it's almost all through meta. And I mean, one of the things I would love to talk about as you're auditing our creative is should we do like more vacations of that, but I have struggled with figuring out how to do like a time-limited creative, like just as it will start to ramp up, then the sale is over or whatever. So we will advertise that like our bundles are a certain percent off, but not like a particular day-based sale. But I would love your feedback on that and suggestions. I don't think your retention is ever going to be monstrous with the product mix you have now. I think the path in your business to generating more retention revenue is going to be via generating like new product revenue, right? So you're going to have to send new products to customers and or excuse me, develop new products and customers are going to have to buy those new products. And that's the way you're going to generate a bunch of return customer revenue over time. There's just not going to be a great way to do that with, you know, by selling people five postcards, you know, they're just not going to do it. So and sending more emails is not going to solve that problem. I think the idea of of clearing your final at times is not a terrible idea by finding different offers you can have. So you'd sort of have like a every so often just see what happens. Do you drive a bunch of new customer revenue via limited time sale on this sort of stuff? Maybe it's just more freebies or whatever. I would probably play with it unless you have a really really strong brand reason why you think you should never be on sale. I think most brands ought to be doing it. The market in Canada can just make a really, really big difference. So yeah, I definitely be considering it. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And we are working on like building out more digital products that people will come back to purchase and physical products. And I also remembered we do do like occasional sales. So we'll do a sale on like Memorial Day and on Labor Day. But I the fact that that's the email list and not always to the add account. I'm curious when you're if you have like basically a week long sale, are you making creative special for that and then just turning all that creative off after the week? I am increasingly. Yes, I mean, in what we do is we build a scheduled, we build a scheduled like report here because a scheduled ad set where it's like it turns on on a certain day, turns off a certain day before you so you don't have to go and like at midnight when your sale ends or go turn it off. Yes. And especially now in, you know, world of potential mass built static ads, but we're working out at AGF growth right now is like just for particularly for sale campaigns, having all of that basically automate for us with AI. There's just not a lot of artistry to like putting a big 20% off next to your product and putting that on the internet. And that's really what sale ads are really, really directly simple. So yes, I do do that. They have various levels of impact. Sometimes they don't really do anything compared to your evergreen creative and people just convert more into your evergreen creative. But okay. Yeah. So yeah. All right. That was that was a lot to, to just get a report built. But, but now tell us something about the business. And when you look at it, like what I would say here is there's nothing obvious to me that jumps out again as like a big problem in this business where, you know, you've got like some massive amount of revenue that that does not capturing or something like that. Like you look, it's pretty clear. You know, 0.74. Yeah, your OS is probably is under selling your true value creation to some degree, but like you definitely got slaughtered in, in, in March. It's not like there's a bunch of revenue in your bank account that you can't attribute to something. Yeah. And that sucks. So, you know, you, you have new customer revenue like this. I also always separate out new and returning customer revenue and all these businesses because you want to think of them as different things, except in your business, because the returning customer revenue is so low, I would, I would be a little less concerned about this because basically if I drive any additional purchase with my ad spend, it's probably pretty incremental because you're just not driving up a certain customer revenue to begin with. So I'm, I'm going to sort of check one thing off the box in my template here, which is like separating out existing customer exclusions. Like I don't even, I haven't even checked to see if you have these or not, but I don't really care. It's just not something that's, that's, that's concerning to me really at all. Okay, so now I have my head a little bit around the business, which is like growing spend back with the AOV going back up because you're fully in stock. And then let's try to think a little bit more as anything actually broken. And so the thing I'm actually look first at is January and February of last year. Before I even look at anything more recently, I want to see what was happening in the business here to where you had this lower AOV. So you were not, you did not have the product that you have now and yet you were performing really, really well in these, in these audiences. So like what do I, what was happening back at that point in the ad account that made things work? And so let me go back to the ad account there and see if I can figure out what was happening there. And I'll show you exactly how I think about this problem. All right, so if I go back to January and February here, you know, the performance here looks pretty good in this campaign. And you've got, let's see, ad set budgets. It looks like interesting. You've got a mix here of ROAS goals and bid caps, so you're running manual bids for these out of counts. Somebody has listened to the Andrew Ferris podcast at some point. So there we go. Which is interesting to see not super surprised that you're getting more spend on these campaigns. Immediately one of the things I'll say is that that $32 bid cap even way back here, which doesn't even is not even as relevant anymore is probably too low relative to the AOV you are at. Like yeah, you're producing like a two to one ROAS. You're us maybe doesn't need to be quite that good Sarah. I think there's a broader question to me in the business. You have such good margins, but so low LTV that you probably do want a pretty high ROAS approach to your add account in general, because you have to make all your money on first purchase, right? So so you do need that. So you don't need that high ROAS to break even. But if you're going to make money in the business, which is the point, you can't expect any LTV basically. So so you have to have something like that. So so like I said, this is probably too conservative of a of a bid back in here. And I'm not super surprised that your ROAS ads are doing a little bit better. The other thing I'll note here is that let's let's look back in here and see what the new customer. Yeah, you were still getting like a two to one AMER. So you probably are under reporting your revenue contribution to some degree in these in this world because you're getting. Yeah, like I said, pretty close to two to one AMER on those spends in a way that that is interesting. Is that ROAS bidding back here? And that does look like actually in January this year, you did pretty well there too, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think we were still writing on the co-tails of December to an extent. So like for part of January, our spend was still pretty high. I started raising my ROAS targets because I knew we were going to stock out. Yeah, so you're also seeing that again. Yeah, yeah, looks like that is missing some value creation in there. And yeah, now you've got a CBO to ROAS. Okay, and this looks like it's been the thing that's taken over most of the account over that time. Okay, so the next thing I need to start figuring out is. So you had you've had really no giant structural changes to the ad account. This CBO is different than it was before, but it's still ROAS bidding, etc. So I'm going to check another thing off my list here in this case, which is manual bids and value optimization. You've got that you pretty much click only I'm not so worried about incremental ads. This point, you've got some CBO, no creative testing. Now let's check, do you have any high spending ads turned off? This is one of the first things that I would be checking at any given time for any out account. If I look in January and I see what your top spending ads are, a lot of times if I see a decline in spend. Then part of the reason why is because somebody took an ad that was on back then is turned off now. And the answer is no, all of these ads, there's something here, which is fine. There's one ad turned off. We don't need even you to get it a Y, but all these ads are still on in the ad account. So if I look at this and I go this like last seven days, great. Yeah, all the ads are still on. That's great. Okay, you see, you're doing a lot of things the way that I would do them here. Well, I do listen to your podcast. Yeah, yeah. Okay. No, it just sort of look alike. I'm not going to bother checking this. I'm assuming these are all broad targeted. Yeah. Okay, great. Okay, camp in separated by economic unit is not really an issue in this business because you basically have one core offer that you're making, right? Well, so I want, this is what I want us to buy them to, which is we have landing pages by audience type. And the bundles are a little bit different. It's the same product. So here's a quilt ad right here. You were out in front of me already. Oh, yeah. No, we've been going big on quilting and you can take a look at the quilting landing page and the other landing pages are the two main pages that we're driving traffic. And these are not in separate campaigns. They are in separate assets. And we are wondering if we might be having an issue with like people bouncing between first getting a quilting ad, then getting on a different landing page, kind of like customer confusion. If there's anything related to that or just generally, you know, curious what you think about having things divided by ads. Yeah, okay. I don't think you need to divide by a set for angles or for audiences or anything like that. I think that is really good at figuring this kind of thing out. And particularly this kind of thing where there's actually real overlap here. There's this question of like, do you need to have. Is metasignal a problem to be solved or is it working for you? Is it like a value add my answer to that in this case is that like it's very unlikely to me that you have to like. Signal engineer your way out of this problem, like what I mean is like you probably can put quilting ads and weaving ads and whatever other makers you want to have all the same campaigns, even in the same assets as long as the AOV and the economic units are about the same what advantage you have is that your assets. Or is that your product like is your skew your skew mix is so simple, right? It's like a couple of products and that's it. So you don't have like like I have an account right now that has, you know, product. If a has a $400 AOV product B has 200 products C is 90 and so like sorting all those things out and they all variations and all these sort of sort of getting all those things in a different ad sets is a really, really big deal, especially with manual bids because you have to be able to give metta more room to spend on the $400 product versus the $200 product right because the cactus so different. So in your case you don't have any of that complexity so there's a question of like do you have a targeting problem and here's my prior on this my prior is until it's very, very clear that you do you probably don't. And so what I mean is like to the baseline positions that creative is targeting and since creative is targeting you are, you are probably targeting the right people just by having creative that works okay so so now let's look at another ad here. Yeah, you can get that one. That's me. This ad Sarah. Yeah, it's great. All right, I get the idea of that as well. This is interesting. Okay, let's look at one more here. Is this the same person. Yeah, are you looking? I'm looking older because I can, but I want to understand what ads have done historically. I just do this one. This one's okay. This is I think a helpful one to see because it's about her teaching in a quilts and shop. Yeah, okay. I'll be honest, I am not a quilter. So when our pallet scout color deck started to really gain traction with quilters and quilt shops, I decided I needed to challenge myself to teach a class at my local quilt store. After the class was listed, it filled up very fast and in just a few short weeks, I found myself teaching 11 complete strangers about how to make pallets and translate those pallets into prints and patterns that pair together into beautiful quilts. Some people were there for a love of color, some were nervous about color and some were just getting back into quilting and looking for a place to get started. I know that this is why quilters are so excited about pallet scout. It checks all of those boxes. That one is much more quilting. Here's what I'll say about these first three ads you've shown me. The as top spenders, the first one says it is a quilt focused ad. But I didn't see almost anything about the ad that actually made me think very much about quilting. Now, maybe if I was a quilter, I would notice the context of it more. For me, it was so, so much less about that. In fact, I couldn't even really see very well the product. Like I couldn't see what pallets got was doing in the ad. The color, the second one you showed me, which had the, which was like the text on screen animation is very clever. But again, I had a hard time understanding like what it was that was sort of it was really getting at. I like the idea a lot of almost like a pop quiz kind of ad for this, which is like why do these colors go together. And are you able to replicate this in your as a maker? I think it's a really good way to sort of help you put people's finger into the into the idea that they need help with this. You know, like the idea of like almost it's like giving them a problem to solve, you know. And in fact, it makes me think about if there's a quiz funnels to be had here, which is like how many of these color things can you get right. So to speak, like, I don't know, like people can have fun with that. And you can say, like, you know, you got three out of six right. But guess what you can get all of them right and it will help you be a maker. And here's how you do it as pallets. And it's like, and then it walks them through kind of what it is because this is sort of a classic product. We're an explainer add to me is like the the ideal ad for this just to show makers. And I would say in a really, really direct way, like what they are doing. So like the next step one step back, what I'll say is, I am almost certain that the core issue that you are facing right now in this out account is just selling the like, it's just selling the product. Like you just have like the most basic meta ads problem. I look at your ad account setup and I think it's all good. There's no, you're not being held back by meta in any way your account setup is solid. I would like to see you have some big caps spending that is you're probably missing some audience there. I think that's probably the biggest thing in the ad account level that is like a challenge here, it looks like we're not getting any big cap ads out. And I bet you could do that a little bit more. So I would probably duplicate these this whole thing. This is probably the biggest structural change I would make duplicate your T Ross campaign exactly as it is, run it with a manual bit. And I would put your I just make sure you be careful about that bid is what what is your last target right now in your mind want a 1.8 is where it's set Okay, so so if you want a 1.8 and you're getting like a let's call it a $75 a.o.v Let's just say 75 divided by 1.8 42 dollars. You'll probably get a little bit of Yeah, I'd set a bid cap at like $45 here and see where it comes in at and see if you need to adjust up or down a little bit It's a little tricky and that is a new attribution because you might get some Click and gauge through things and then there's delayed attribution people click today and buy it through weeks and like There's all of these little like confusing things like that But I would set a bid cap at something like $45. I don't see that anywhere Yeah, I'm not running big cats right now. Yeah, yeah, and if the key to that idea is that and I've made this point before right with my beautiful modern fuel pen here if If you think about every customer in the world as being on on two sides of a spectrum this Customer over here is the customer that's least likely to To spend a lot of money with you this customer Spends spends a lot of money and a lot of money. I mean a.o.v Right, so like lower a.o.v. higher a.o.v You're target row as ads are highest value optimization So they're gonna target people on the high a.o.v side But that means it's all these people over here as well on the low a.o.v. side now It actually may end up being a similar a.o.v. across these ads like who knows because you have a simple enough product mixed or you might not But I find that these two are really actually distinctive to people. There's overlap in the middle Somewhere in here you're gonna hit both people and that's okay Maddox you can have some overlap between the two But in general when you run value ads and volume ads highest volume ads with a manual bid would be a bid cap or a cost cap Highest value ads would be a target row as ad with a manual bid. Okay, that that actually they do reach different people Which the brass tax on that is that one way for you to increase your spend is just by making sure you've got both going all the time Because if you have both going all the time you are maximizing matters ability to reach the most people on this and what should happen Is you add those volume ads is that you shouldn't getting a lower CPM and a wider reach by by doing that And so that's the thing that I would do right away here is just go literally just straight up duplicate this target rows campaign You might have to do a couple things to get all of it right like take all the stuff here that's spending in the last 30 days At all duplicate all of these into a bid cap campaign Set your attribution at seven day click one day engaged view that will give you sort of the Maximum region like I said set that target somewhere around 45 bucks to start see where you start if you get any spend If you're getting no spend here when I would if when you do that I would take the bid cap up to $55 and keep your budget down like 300 or something like that like 200 something something low Something you're pretty comfortable where if you have a couple of bad days. It's not going to kill your business or anything And then and then even those out over time It's it's really tricky to set bids right now because again that the definition of a click attributed purchase changed So now factoring in how those engaged throughs work into work into your target is tricky because the default in meta is going to include those engaged views If you set the attribute setting, I just said And so just kind of understand it is is tricky, but But but basically something like that number and see kind of where your actual Cat comes in at set that somewhere we trust it And I bet you you will get more reach on those ads. You may even get a lot more reach on those ads. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, so would I duplicate the campaign or the ad set? Well, I was going to say duplicate the adsets because it will be easier because you've got a lot of adsets in here And you don't care about all these old ones that are not on anymore. So the simple thing to do is just take all of these um Like this duplicate it and when you duplicate Put it into a new campaign and it should take all those adsets and put them in new you may have to like Like it'll just be annoying like you might have to do like four from it once like this And then you know, I mean like a little bit little but But get all of those into a new campaign. That's at a big cap level But but does that does the total approach make sense? Yeah, I think the reason I was hesitant to do that was I thought that the same people would be getting the same ads But like different like copies of ads that sounds like you don't think really smart Some people will like I said if you come back to this analogy, there's some overlap here in the middle But but but they actually do target it's different optimizations like right so so the telltale sign up It's working correctly is that you'll end up with those with those two having the the big cap campaign Well, because again, it's volume optimized. It's getting it's going through the lowest cost Conversion it should have a lower cpm Probably a lower conversion rate though. That's a little bit more secondary and a lower a of e Like my guess is that more of those people will not take your upsell you know that kind of thing And and maybe that's only like a 10% difference in AOVs But sometimes they'll see that with like a 30 or 40% difference in in cpm So you'll reach a wider range of people that you were just otherwise not reaching and it should extend your reach just some to some degree Okay, but you would send it to the same landing pages. I remember now that that's why I would literally change nothing Great, that sounds easy. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is easy. That's one of the things I love about this strategy actually is that's incredibly fast and easy Okay, um, I will try that and I'm curious. So if you are saying that you think a lot of this is Creative if you have more suggestions on our creative or landing pages. Yes, let's do it Yeah, yeah, so that's the thing I was going to say was structurally I think everything else is good to go. I don't think you have any other issues What does it say? It doesn't seem like you're having a hard time getting new ads to spend there It's just like it seems like a new ads are spending That the total package is not spending as much as you want them to exactly Okay, um, okay, one other thing that I'm seeing right now is that you do have a mix in here Of click and click plus view And that's another thing I would factor in is that these ones all you're basically including for all these because of the new The new way that meta Uh measures this sort of thing these are all these all basically get more purchases Assigned to them than these ones and so set up the same rose rose target I mean these ones are a little more conservative. I see you're at a 1.8 You're at a 1.8 target here versus like a 1.9 to 2 here Um, so that's maybe that's maybe part of why but what I would do is in fact, yeah I don't know if I would totally Overhaul everything if it's spending but My ideal setup would actually just to be have all of these have the same attribution setting and I some people will think this is crazy But I actually wouldn't have any problem Like literally relaunching everything here And I bet you'll still get the best ads spending to just see seven day click one day engaged view So care and you would lose all the comments and all the history and you just wouldn't worry about that I don't think you necessarily would lose all the comments and all the history Uh, because you should be able to carry them over There used to be a thing that is selected But the truth is I wouldn't actually care about that. Oh, this is another this is like one of my more contrary and opinions Is that I don't think of you problem. There's actually a simple way to test this though. Don't do the whole thing at once Um, take like maybe your number three spending ad set here So it's not literally not your top spending one duplicate that one with seven to click one day engaged view and see if it still spends proportionally like it was before does that make sense? Yeah Yeah, no it makes sense. I mean, I did move the April ones over but I could move the November So basically you're just duplicating and then turning off the old one. Is that right? But yeah, but get rid of the view you don't want view through you want only seven days click and one day engage Okay, because view through is still going to be messy for you. That's still going to include a bunch of like kind of garbage purchases Um, you're you're getting some view converges. It's not too crazy in here But um, but yeah, like this is why I have that distinction between click and and uh I see Uh, and not so let's see I'm just put these ones in here. So you know, it's pretty small for you, but Um, but yeah, I would get rid of the view conversions Okay on on these ones and add engage view and then I would duplicate the whole thing to the bid gap That way it's all the exact same attribution. If nothing else you're comparing apples to apples that way. Yeah, okay So yeah, okay, that's what I would do like I said you could do a couple of minute time Just make sure that like nothing goes crazy, but mm-hmm. Yeah Okay, worst case scenario flip on your old ones, but uh yeah If you are building an e-commerce business and you are trying to be profit minded you care a lot About how much each click on your website drives value in your business You should be using intelligence intelligence is just one of those tools that my best clients are using all the time to test The outcomes of their split tests on their website at CRO beyond the basics Of course they can do all the normal CRO stuff simple split testing things But they go way beyond that to be a really full and complete tool for revenue and profit optimization for your entire Website experience and landage experience and all those things so they can test price they can test free shipping threshold They can test how much you're charging for shipping they can test offers all kinds of different things that really move the needle and how your Brand generates profit from visitors on your website. They measure all of those outcomes Not just the level of conversion rate or revenue per visitor, but a profit per visit because they tie into your COGS data On your website and therefore they know how much uh not just revenue you're driving profit you're driving because they can see what your COGS are That's all about they're building in all kinds of other really cool features right now like In checkout upsell post purchase upsell so you could theoretically actually get rid of your post purchase upsell app And just to have that be done with it buy intelligence on top of all the other stuff you're doing with them all with that same goal right Finding ways to test and optimize to generate the most profit per visit Just a really awesome piece of software you can get 20% off your first three months 20% off your first three months With a go Ferris 20 f a r is 20 you should be testing your website You should be finding out if it's working based on the actual value it's driving in the business the level of profit Go to inteljumps.io use that code Ferris 20 to go do it today Okay, if you have made it this far in this episode. I just need to super shout out Mike leave us in here Editor Mike has done an incredible job because we have had more tech problems episode Then I've had in a very long time on this show Sarah has been so gracious patient with me But leave a comment on this episode and say, thank you, Mike, because Mike has worked hard for your viewing enjoyment on this episode. Alright, assuming those are the only structural issues and I think the big cap one could be a bigger one. I don't remember if I already said that or not because of all the second issues, but, but that one could be a bigger thing having volume optimization alongside your value optimization could really open up more spend that said, and I think you should align your your attribution settings. Yeah, there's I don't know is there a reason why this is separated out to Sarah this. It's just old and legacy, and so when I heard about, you know, new better ways to optimize, I started moving forward, but didn't change anything moving back. Yeah, I dump them into the new one into the CBO. It's not going to hurt anything, which is easier. Again, probably with manual bids, probably not a huge deal, like just something I would do. Okay, so I think the big issue here though is creative and there is this question about sort of what is going to work. And so I would look at your creative for this in a few different ways. And we will get to landers in a little bit by the way. The first thing I would look at here is like, what can you do at the general level to explain this product to people in a way that's clear, because I think this has sort of mass market appeal. In general, and Sarah, you might have done this already. I'm not looking through all of your creative here, but do you feel like you've made just like very straightforward here is what it is and why it's good ads. Well, so it's interesting because I think of that the color harmony explainer one, which you already looked at as our cleaner video. The fact that you still couldn't tell what the product does, I think telling that should be updated more. And we also have a founder video that I think explains it well and I'm curious what you think of that. I lost you for a second say say that last part again. Sorry, you said that you you said that you were you found it. This is your explainer out. Yeah, so I found it interesting like if if that still wasn't really clear to you what the product does and I've also explained the product to you, then I think we could definitely be clear. And there's also a founder explainer and which gets a lot of spend maybe not as much the past month. Is it called is it this one? No, if you let's like are you in both are you looking at both campaigns right now? No, look at both of them and their founder. Oh, yes. Okay, here we go. This is actually tossing out. There we go. Okay, this is great. Here's what I created. Yes. Wait, actually, I'm going to open it and Instagram in a separate window. This is why I created our best selling color tool, Palette Scout. I own a yarn company and color is at the heart of so much of our work. One day while squinting and spinning a color wheel, I had my light bulb moment, a deck of cards, each with a full flood of color and a fund an intuitive way to mix and match into pleasing harmonies. Two years and four prototypes later, we launched palettes out. This is great. I think this is really good. I would do a couple things here. The first is I would I would actually go even more direct and what I mean by that is you've got kind of a hooky intro on that ad. I'd make another ad we call this this we literally call this the super direct explainer at age of growth. And I'm actually in the process now of making like this structure of this ad into something that we do for every new account we get right when they first start working with us. It's like basically like in our sort of intro package of ads without our strategy is even thinking about it. It just becomes S O P for us because it works so well so often. And yeah, it goes like this. This is the product from brand and here's why it's good. Okay, so it's that it's literally that script. Okay, and I mean I have seen these ads spend. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and it's it's actually annoying. It's like it's like man, I want to be a creative person and do cool work, but it's just really hard like this is. This is one of those things where it just works really, really well. This is palettes scout from from Zali and it's the perfect way to help you. Make it so that the colors on your on the things you make again, you're going to frame this. You're going to get a language right right. The colors on the things that you on on the craft and the craft you're making on the products you're making look like they're made by professional or whatever, okay, something like that. And you say here's why it works so well. It's a deck of cards. It has a series of colors show the card like show the card really clearly. And see the reason I think the one that you the founder video works better than the color harmony video and the animation is because I think it's way clearer. It's it's and I just don't think I think almost everybody underestimates clarity in the creative process. So what I would do is I would make that and then I would challenge yourself to make five to 10 more versions of that ad. I would have you be the one to do it and you reference yourself as the founder. And I would do five to 10 versions of that ad for different people. And so what I mean is like. And this is this is hold up a quilt and the in the color palette or the card the, yeah, the palette scout card. And it would be the, this is palette scout from Zali. And it's the best way to make your quilts look, whatever, you know, how, whatever they care about interior design. If you're designing a room. This is the best way to write. Then you branch out from there to where you start with start with that formula. This is the product from brand. You do five to seven of those or whatever. Those kinds of things. And then and you try to target those different audiences. One of them is really broad. Just about exactly what the product is. The other one sort of have that sort of specific angle to the specific audience are trying to reach. And then I would go out from there and my next, my next round of ads out would be sort of that direct style. But it would be it would actually start with the start with the person that you're talking to. So it would be something like. The biggest problem with design redesigning renovating your room with or that you're living room in your house is making us that the colors look great or show a good version of it and a bad version of it. The level of professionalism in your house, you actually don't need to be an interior designer. We've made this really easy for you to tell how colors work together. And you could say something like about your credentials here. Like, did you go to art school? I did not. I studied history. But I have worked in a creative field with a yarn company for 10 years. Yeah, sure. Right. I started a yarn company. I understand color theory deeply. It's confusing to a lot of people. So I made it easy for you like this. Or you can say something like, the reason why some colors work well together or don't is because of color theory. Color theory is a lot to get your head around. I made it really easy for you like this. Here's how it works. So for example, you know, and just show people, because I think what people need to do is they need to see, here's the problem that I'm having. I can now locate that problem in my mind and my heart, my experience, my emotions. And then into the next stage, it's like, here's how this solves it. They need to see the cards. They need to see what they actually need to look at the cards in it. And you lay them out like this. And here's exactly how it works. I was like, here's how they work together. Here's how easy it is for you to use it. Anybody can use it, even if they think it colors, you know. And then you and whatever. And you say, and we've now sold us to thousands of people. So that thing you said there, like we're in these big art supply stores. We've sold this many of them. That's all the validation and stuff. And here's the guarantee and all that stuff. Right. So I would do that with these different personas in mind where the bigger audiences are and try to start reaching those people out from there. There's all kinds of other stuff you can do and as you can make. But actually, I'll tell you, when I saw the top spending ad you had in January of this year, that was the woman showing people in a quilting class. But like I said, you couldn't even really see what the cards are that she's looking at. I'm like, oh, we can beat that out. Like you should feel good because I know you can beat that out there. Like I know you can't because it's actually not very clear what it is. I don't think as somebody who's a little hell of a little distance from the cars and stuff. And so you can definitely make that next step there. So I think that's like, that's the kind of stuff I would be doing as much as I possibly could. I actually would make some static ads here where it's literally just the card. Because I think the card sort of self explanatory. You set me a deck or I'll go right there. They're cool. Like they, they, you know, the card shows you here's how these colors go together and like, just have it there like. Use this to pair colors, you know, whatever in your house, like it's just simple stuff like that. But people just see it and feel it. And I would be doing as much as that as possible. Now, the other thing I would do in your space at the creative level is as much as possible. Also, I would be trying to get creators involved with this and connecting this palette scout to their project in a way that shows people how palette scout fits into their end goal of making cool projects. And so it like you are in a creative field with a bunch of creative people and I bet some of them would be really happy to support you in this sort of thing. They probably love it and all that. And I would just say like, hey, we want to see your projects and what we really want to know is how palette scout helped you make it and get people to sort of unwind that for people. You know, I couldn't decide how that this part of the hat was going to go with this part of the shirt. I don't know, you know, whatever, like. And and and help people make the connection between palette scout and the actual project they're working on. And I would be thinking about those target personas and those specific ways. The magic of meta ads in so many ways is that it's this incredible creative matching machine, right? It's like for the quilter they're going to get a bunch of quilting content and people have watched this show recently or listen to my podcast recently, they've heard me use this example a bunch of times, but. But it well, it's just it can get so specific. And so you're able to speak to people in really, really specific ways and I would encourage. as you to keep making creative that does a whole bunch of stuff like that. Okay, let me pause there and see what your feedback is on that thought. Yeah, no, this is all super helpful. I put myself on mute so I can write lots of comments down. I think this makes a lot of sense. I'm looking through my notes here. In your, I don't remember how you put it, the super basic ad. Are you also sharing like that? It's sold out and where it's stocked or is it just like this is what the product does. Hey, if you like this episode, you should subscribe right now wherever you're watching or listening to it because if you like this, it's the kind of stuff I'm talking about all the time. How to grow your e-commerce business with profit driven meta ads using things like manual bids, creative, all that kind of stuff. Also, leave a comment while you're here. I'd love to hear your thoughts on Sarah's out account. What is she doing that she should not be doing? What should she not be doing that she is doing and all the rest? I read and respond to everyone of those comments. Leave a comment. Subscribe. Thanks. Are you also sharing like your own credibility and where it's stopped and selling out? It's all of that. It's just being even more direct without a hook. Yep. Yep. It's the way I think about it is hook body validation and guarantee offer. So I'd put that all in there. Hook body body is the education component of it. Validation guarantee offer. Validation guarantee is really just validation. That means it's all one thing, but the guarantee is part of validation a lot of times and then offer. So hook body validation offer. The hook in this case, it just didn't think of this as a hook, but it is, right? It's that that line. This is the product and brand. This is why it's good. The validation can be all that stuff. Yeah. I've yarn company for 10 years, you know, all the things that you've said in there. How many of sold all that stuff? And on top of that, if you have any kind of guarantee to do that and then say we'll also give you a second to complete the set. We'll give you this also for this much, you know, I mean, all the things. So put that in the offer. Yeah. That simple. So let me actually take this another step out, though. What is your current ability to generate creative? Like, are you able to do this? Do you have a, do you have, when I tell you go make more ads, are you like, oh, I'm going to die. I have to make more ads that too much to do already in this business. No. Okay. Because I have great people that work with me and that are working really hard on making new creative. And so I think some more direction and ideas to try is great. Yeah. How much creative are you outputting right now? We're trying to do 30 a month. Okay. Great. I think the fastest pathway to you, generating a much more sales is to start with the message of your ad. So when you're forming creative, start with who am I talking to and what am I trying to say to them? Get as specific as you possibly can with those messages. Do not be afraid to make your ads long. Okay. That's nothing. If there's stuff to explain, if it takes a while to explain it, explain it. If people, all the information they need to confidently purchase pallets out in this. And then, and then, yeah. And then think about what creative ideas you can make. And then, and then try to get that number from 30 to 100. Yes. Or whatever. I've just pulled a hundred out of a half. But do you see what I'm saying? Try to see what happens if you can make it a lot bigger. Seed to more people get creators going those kinds of things. I think you do have a product that can reach a lot wider of an audience than you're reaching right now. You just have to speak to those people really specifically. And people talk so much about like creative in the age of Andromeda. And like, oh, how did Andromeda change things at all? And the answer to that question is like, it just made it possible to talk to people more specifically. And so find as many people as you can think of who have a reasonable case for using pallets out to match colors in their life better. And or, you know, I'm saying match, but you know what I mean? To be better with color in their life, think about what they are making. And then, and then figure out ways to tell them that that the pain they're feeling in their making process is something that you can solve. I'm framing that in very problem solution ways. It might not actually be pain. It might be like, you might not be solving a problem, so much as providing inspiration. I think that's another thing that you can feel just feel a little more confident. I think I said, I think sometimes people want to be doing stuff like this, but they don't feel like they can do it. So maybe sort of encouraging people almost to be some of the tone of your ads. You can do it. That kind of thing. Yeah, I was I was watching, I was watching that video of those women doing quilts and I was thinking, what are they thinking about their quilting experience? Well, they're in that store talking with a member of your team about pallets out. What is there? What do they want to have happen when they make a quilt? You know, they're trying to, they're trying to create beauty in the world in some way. You know, they're doing something that matters. And, and so how can you help them along the way of doing that? I don't need to tell you this while people, but there's something great about that. And for you to kind of find a way to come alongside them and say, and say like, we can help you, I can help you do that and then find where are those little places where they're getting messed up, you know, like I think is is really important. So, and you can speak to those extremely specific little places. That's that's the beauty of sort of and drama and advertising is like exactly exactly where the problem is for the quilter. You can speak to it exactly where the problem is for the weaver. You can speak to it. I don't I don't know in the process where that is, but you probably do. Yeah. So to speak to those things. Yeah. So another question for you. And maybe this is where we get into landing paid, looking at landing pages and bundles. But we do a lot of talking in our ads about pallets out. And most of our ads don't necessarily talk about the whole bundle, the different sort of products that go along with it. And they are explained that on the landing page. And I am just curious if you think we should do like explainer ads about our bundles or just in general to get your feedback on how we're merchandising bundles here. And this is a, I'll just tell you this is like a there are our landing page for general art design folks. And we also have another landing page that's for quilter. So you can take a look. Okay. I'll find that one too. So yes, I think you should make a super direct explainer for the whole bundle. So the same thing that I just said before. But for the whole bundle, just just do the exact same thing where you say like, okay, this is the pallet scout bundle from Zolly or whatever it's called. Right. And say like it has these two things. And here's why it's good. You know, it's not just the cards. It's also this. I mean, just walk through the whole thing. The way I sort of frame this for people sometimes. And I don't know if that'll work, right? Like pallets got alone might be good. You might have to tack this on to the pallet scout out on top, you know, in the offer section. We're also going to include this in this. And here's here's why that's also good. You know, think of almost like if you think about that, it's like a infomercial style almost, right? Like those, that's the kind of thing I've been thinking like, but wait, there's more that kind of idea. But I, I do think you could try it with the whole bundle and that you should try it with the whole bundle and see, just show people all the value they're providing that you're providing all along the way. So yeah, I don't know if that'll work, but I could see it. All right. So we're going to look at a landing page here. And like, like any time we're looking at a landing page, if you're looking at a desktop shame on you. So I switched us down to this. Let's see. I gotta try and make this pop out. I'd probably use my pallet scout to find a contrast in color to to this. And like, I missed this at first. I probably actually put it up here too. Like, let offers offer pages like this. It's often the case that like the, the offer is the main thing they're good at actually. Yeah. So, so yeah, so like making that clear. Meet your new CEO weapon is, is interesting. Do you think quilters know what problem they have? I think quilters who decide they want to use pallet scout already can see that they don't feel confident using color most of them. The people tell me where that shows up in the quilting process. At what point of making their quilt do they feel their lack of confidence in color? So many quilters have tons of fabric in their stash and they'll set out to make a new quilt and they'll look around their stash and try to figure out what to pull. And there's, you know, a moment where you're pulling lots of different fabrics and putting them together and trying to figure out what's going to look good together. And when you quilt, you cut. So once you cut your fabric, like there's no going back. So people like in that moment is they're planning out their quilt before they start coming. They're really wanting to choose colors that they're going to, no we're going to pop and look great together. So speaking really, really specifically to really different people, specifically with quilters. So have you made ads that have spoken to the specific problems of like I said, somebody literally in the moment of, of standing in front of a whole bunch of, of a fabric and deciding which ones to use or somebody cutting fabric and realizing they made the wrong decision. Have you spoken, made ads to speak to those? Yeah, actually one of the ads that just started picking up recently was an ad that Anna and our team put together. I think it's called stash avoid art. I'm curious if you want to look at it and you think that speaks to it. Oh, I did see I did see there was a newer ad that was spending called and it's smashing. Look at this. Yes, yes, that's great. It's like it's really doing great. That's interesting. So this is her walking through a project. Look at that. It's by far your top spending out right now in the last couple days. It's actually this is great. It's like taking over your account and it's crashing. Okay, this is awesome. Let's see. Let's see what we can make with this fabric. See, I love this. This floral has been sitting in my stash for days. Oh, fabric I've been avoiding. That is so good. I love it, but I could never figure out what to pair it with. Today, I'm using this red as my anchor color and I'm determined to actually admit to a palette that works with it. I found the closest match in my palette scout deck, garnet two. Okay, who made this out? Anna on our team. She did great. This is so good. She did wonderful. This is exactly what I mean. Think about that hook. That super direct explainer out is one approach to this. It speaks to a broad range of people within a certain category. This though is like talks to the particular moment. That is such a specific problem that a quilter has. And the whole magic of meta ads is the ability to, that without doing any targeting, meta finds people who respond to that hook, right? They're responding to the content. It's like a tick-tock piece of content in this respect, where it's just organic content basically that sort of works in this. Do you know what I mean? And you just get more like content like that all the time. So I would go find that angle, if you know what I mean, for as many of your personas as you possibly can. Where is the place that people are getting stuck on something? And how, and this is, I can already see, just with a shot that I paused on, you can already see that you're going to solve that problem. I look, okay, here it is. I've got my anchor color. I matched it to the color right here in Palette Scout. I might even try to make sure it's clear that it's easy to match the color. You know, like, you know, like fine, look, well, it's really easy to find which card is, and then, okay, hold on, I'm going to press play again. And pull the palette ideas card for it. Monochrome is my safe zone, but I don't have a lot of red in my stash. So today, I'm going. Oh, this is so good. After playing. You need to make a hundred of this ad. You need to make as many of them as you can. This, this is, this speaks so specifically. I love this. This speaks so specifically. To what your customer is dealing with and struggling with. And it's not surprising to me. When you said we spent a thousand dollars yesterday. From, from other's day, it is not because of mother's day. Yeah. It's because it's because that ad. Is ripping. Yeah. It's, it's really, really good. I love this. Okay. That's, that's your next task is to go and make as many as as possible. And keep finding what is the problem somebody's experiencing. How does pallets go? It. Step into that highly specific point. I love this. And then for your lander, which you were bringing, which you were bringing up earlier. Let me see. I would almost say this like. I'll connect this almost more. In fact, I would, I wouldn't even make a version of this. It's specifically tied to that one ad. You know, you know, something to the effect of like. Uh. Never, or like. Uh. Uh. What would the headland be? Like. Uh. Never wonder. Which fabrics to pair again. That sucks. I, I, you know what I'm saying? Like, try to speak more specifically to that particular experience. Um, in your, in your, like, this is still kind of vague to me. Meet your new secret weapon. You know, I think you're saying speak to the pain in the headline. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And how this solves it. Right. It's a big part of it. So, yeah. Um. Yeah. I think this could be a lot clearer. Um, I might have like multiple buttons that are like. Like three levels, like. It's just like pal scout only. Scout plus whatever this one comes with. Uh, sticker pack. You know, you mean instead of a drop down. Is that way? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like pills or I just want to make sure I understand what you're supposed to. Uh, it'd be like, uh, like think about like a stop. Like, uh, Well, probably what would be is like three boxes on top of each other. With like a better best. Yeah. Kind of thank you to say I'm saying just like. Yes. Yeah. Um, escalating discount on them, you know, try to think about what that offer could be full price if you only buy a palette scout and this is that thing where like do one version of it that's like that and another version of it that doesn't even have the bottom tier option. This is one of them converts better than the other. This is also where value bidding and volume bidding can actually really matter it might be that on the volume campaign more people take the bottom option on the value campaign more people take the top option to having both can really matter, you know, those are the kind of things that I might think about here is is some of that. At some point I'm going to do a landing page episode because we're building a landing page builder that's sort of in beta right now with our clients, but yeah. But anyway, that's something I would do I think your problem is solve Sarah, I think you you need to spend as much organizational energy as possible on this next that's what you need to do on finding these kinds of creative angles and on finding this kind of creative for add like double triple quadruple the volume we're doing it out right now. For all of these specific subgroups of makers and then you need to speak to you need to find exactly that angle you just did make the super direct explainer and then find the exact angle that you just did. And find that same pain point for each of these different kind of subgroups of your customers and I think I think that's the way forward from here more than your lander more than anything else. You can offer testing you can do for sure, but I think I think that the performance that we're seeing over the last couple days, it's great timing that we're doing this podcast when we're doing it because it's such a validation of how much like creative is just the issue there's no ghost in the machine there's no big meta problem. Like I said, do that add the volume bidding, I think you're going to be a good shape. So would you also work on like more versions of that for the same niche or you would just like also would you make statics like that or is that more of a video sure. Yeah, I think we tend to think about creative as like explore and expand like one of the things I don't want you to miss here is that the thing that's moving the needle in this ad is first and foremost the message I do think it's a good first shot in that like that piece of fabric is sort of eye catching. In that in that video. I just think also I just think also that like the main thing though it's working is like this idea of I've been trying to find some I've had this piece of fabric for eight years. I haven't found anything I want to use it and I haven't been able to like this is what everybody under rates about creative is it's so much about saying something compelling to people it's about ideas. And ideas that hit people emotionally because this is an emotional problem in the sense of like it's frustrating to sit on fabric that you feel like is just wasting away you know. You feel wasteful and all those things but totally but the message is first and foremost and that's that's the thing that I would take away from that and so yes I would I would expand on that message I would. I mean fabric is so visual that like yeah absolutely go make the same ad but with five other pieces of fabric you know like. Change it up a little you know but but like roughly that same I didn't see if it helps it might be that the crazier the fabric the better like what happens if you use. I don't know the quilters by like weird fabric oh yeah. Okay I mean you know some people and you know it's fun to work with unusual right we're bringing you into the world yeah yeah so find so find the weird fabric something it's like. And start there this is the craziest fabric I bought in a long time it's got these patterns on it I I love that I just didn't know what to do with it and so here's how I saw that you know. But yes definitely go do a bunch of that and like I said go find that same angle for five other personas if you know what I mean. Well thank you for sticking with the tech issues and giving me feedback anything else you want to share or. Well I was going to say explore expand we break these things up and explore expand so we say explore is finding new angles expand is find is repeating angles that work. So explore would be this in this case would be the same angle for different personas that would probably call it explore technically not the same angle but the same the same idea right find the pain point in the process speak to that expand would be. Yeah take the same pain point for quilters and then find new ways to say it that are creative in terms of ad formats find statics that say it. Find find different videos that say it find creators that can do it whatever you know so yeah yeah and then listen if it works you got to come back on and. And tell people you don't have to show them the gobs of money that you're swimming in when you've implemented these things you know it's okay. But we can speak in someone vaguely but I would love to have an update if you get more of this going. Yeah I really appreciate your health Andrew I love listening to your podcast and I learn a lot and it's fun to get to put it in place in our business. Yes awesome okay I'm excited to see how this goes thanks there thank you. Alright kind of a monster episode hope you followed all of that please do subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to that I think you will like my other content if you like that big shout out to my sponsors in this episode and tell gems. Behind the scenes studio the links for those are in the show notes go follow up with both of them and of course if you're interested in having me work with your brand or or do anything like that or even do this kind of episode with you. And you're willing to share it like there did podcasts at age of growth calm is place to email me and tell me about what you're thinking and of course do leave a comment as well because I do read all this and I respond to I think pretty much every one of them almost every one of them sure try to. And if you want to want me to work on your brand in some way or or maybe find you a great partner who can even if we're not the right fit go to age of growth calm fill at the intake forum tell me a little bit a little bit about your business and I'd love to get in contact with you and see if I can be some help. Thanks for watching listening all kinds of great episodes coming soon as always so make sure you don't miss those I'll see you next time.