the meta ads strategy that made my app $283,273

0:00In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how I was able to put $1 into paid ad spend and get about $3 back step by step. And I'm going to show you the one hack that made scaling this possible. And it's something that most others are still doing completely wrong. Let's jump into it. This is my App Store Connect dashboard. And in this 12 month period, this one mobile app did $283,000 in sales. And in that same period, we spent $31,000 on Facebook ads and $81,000 on Tik Tok ads. That's about $112,000 in total ad spend to generate $283,000 in revenue. And thanks to the small

0:45business program where Apple only takes 15%, that means $224,000 in total proceeds. Now, you might be thinking, $112,000 in, $283,000 out, that's a 2 and a half times return. Maybe you're thinking, "Oh, that's not that crazy." Here's the part you need to keep in mind. This was a subscription-based app, meaning all of these subscribers that we were paying for would consistently pay month over month. This was recurring revenue. And it just so happens that this app I was able to scale to 44K per month before exiting the business. I sold this

1:20company to a larger mobile app studio. Okay. And here we have the blueprint, the stepbystep process. We're breaking it down into five phases. The five phases of scaling ads profitably for your app. Phase number one, we're going to go over the, you know, the math that you need to understand before you spend a single dollar on paid ads. Phase two, we're going to go over the framework of profitable ad campaigns. Phase three,

1:43how to build a tactical content library. Phase four is going to be building the campaigns themselves. So, I'm going to show you exactly how to do it in Meta Ads. And then phase five, of course, analyzing these paid ads, scaling, cutting the losers. We're going to go through each one of these step by step. If you want this entire document that I'm showing you right now, it is going

2:01to be in the description for download. All right, so let's dive in and let's start with phase one. The first thing being the CAC to LTV. This is the most important part of scaling ads. Your customer acquisition cost and your users's lifetime value. How much do you spend to acquire a customer and how much does that customer earn you over their lifetime? The golden ratio for this is one to three. That's what they call the golden ratio. You're spending $1. Let's pretend $1 to acquire a customer and over their lifetime that customer earns you $3 back. Obviously, if you can get higher than this, amazing. But this is

2:38what you want to aim for, a one:3 CAC to LTV ratio. And that's exactly what we had on on Puff Count, right? We were spending around 34 cents, 50 cents, 43 cents per install. And those installs were earning us around a dollar, sometimes $150 in better months, every single time. One to three CAC to LTV, baby. Now, how did we get there? First things first, in order to run paid ads profitably, your funnel needs to be dialed in. Every single app looks like this. This is your app's funnel. You need to be able to get high-quality

3:10content so your views are converting. People are clicking on your ads. Your onboarding needs to be dialed in so you're not losing users when they first install your install your app. Your payw wall needs to be AB tested and optimized. Because if you are losing people at any stage, if they're not clicking on your ads, if they're dropping off on your onboarding, if they're not converting on your payw wall, you will not be able to run paid ads profitably. They're going to go through each one of these phases. And if there's drop off in each one of these phases, you will not be able to make the

3:38maximum amount of money from each user. So, you need to make sure that your funnel is dialed in. Luckily, I have videos on every stage of this. Go check those out. I'll leave them linked in the description, but you need to make sure that your funnel is airtight before you spend and before you invest a single dollar on paid ads. You need to also understand that no optimizations on your paid ads will save bad math. If your funnel isn't airtight and your CAC to LTV can't reach profitability because of your funnel, you will never be able to scale paid ads because ads will not fix a broken product. They will just further

4:13emphasize the brokenness, if that makes sense. So, you need to make sure that your payw wall, your pricing, your onboarding are all dialed in. Those come first. And you also need to understand that the quality of the content that you're running on paid ads is so very important. For example, Andromeda's update just came out. This is the new meta ads engine. And there are key changes that happened. Broad targeting wins, which is great for you and me. You no longer have to be a paid ads wizard to be able to run profitable ad campaigns. They've made it so easy for anybody on the planet to run paid ads as

4:46long as your content is good and your product is good, right? The creative in this new update is now the targeting because the the AI engine that Meta has now introduced understands the video content and it will use the video, the words in your video, the transcript in your video, the visuals in your video to target your ideal customer. Creative is so important in this latest update. Also very important, there is a higher demand for creative diversity. Ads fatigue quickly, so you need to understand how to get a lot of content. And I'm going to show you exactly how to do that without lifting a finger. You don't have

5:19to film any ads. I'm going to show you exactly how to get highquality content at scale. Count simplification. This is something that I've been preaching for a long time. You don't need 40 campaigns, 40 adsets. You just don't need that anymore. You need one campaign, one ad set, and a lot of creatives in that ad set. We're going to show you how to set up the campaigns in a second. And again, you know, another emphasis here on performance impact. Ad quality is very

5:44important. Let's move on to phase two. This is the framework that you need to understand in order to set up profitable campaigns. We need to first identify our viral marketing message. What is that messaging that is going to make your product stand out? What is the messaging that is going to make users interested enough to convert? At the end of the day, you're competing against every

6:04other company who is running paid ads. You're competing against millions of different companies. So, you need to identify what is going to make your product stand out. Next, of course, we need to build out our content library. Short form content is what is winning on paid ads. We need to then optimize the content around our funnel. When you run paid ads, your funnel is going to react differently than people finding you organically. You're essentially forcing these users to watch your content, right? And it's a much different mindset

6:34than a customer finding you organically. So, your funnel is going to react differently to paid ads. We need to measure the effects on our funnel. And then based on those effects, we can optimize the content, we can optimize what events we're targeting. And we can optimize the funnel itself. And when you're doing this, when you're analyzing and reinvesting into paid ads, you need

6:54to take the scientific method approach. If you change your viral marketing message, if you change all of your content, if you change your funnel all at the same time, you have no idea what caused the changes. Did did your profitability go up? Did it go down? You don't know what caused the change. So, you need to take the scientific method approach. Meaning, you can only test one of these things at a time. Whether it's changing your content, changing your messaging, changing your funnel, changing your pricing, you can't change multiple things at the same time and then expect to know what's working and what's not. Phase three, getting the

7:27content so that you can run ads. The content, as Zuckerberg just told us, demand for creative diversity. The creative is the targeting. broad targeting wins. Everything is pointing to high quality content. The content that you run on paid ads is the most important lever right now. It is the number one thing that you need to

7:50optimize. How do you get that content? Let me tell you, the old way is broken. You don't want to pay creators upfront. You don't want to pay massive influencers thousands of dollars for them to deliver you some halfeffort piece of content. You don't want to create the content yourself. Trust me, I did that. I grew my organic Tik Tok following. I I filmed content for years and years on end. And it was a grind and it's a skill that you have to develop over a long period of time. If you expect to be able to go on Instagram, on Tik Tok, start filming content and be

8:23good at it immediately and have that content perform on paid ads. It's going to be tough for you. It's going to take a long, long time. What you can do instead is get content creators to make content for your brand riskfree. And I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. But one thing you need to understand first is how to do market research. How to identify winning formats in your niche. There are two easy ways to do this. Number one, you

8:46can go to viral ad library.com. You can sort by all types of different categories here. And you can see exactly what is working for other apps in your space. Let's go to health and fitness for example. Boom. Here are all of their ads. This app is doing 600k per month. Here are all of their ads and the organic content that is working the best for them. You go through here, you click on one of these, you see ad breaks, ad breakdowns, why this ad worked, the

9:11summary, discover, discover similar ads. I highly recommend you scroll through viral ad library to understand what's working in your niche. Alternatively, you can also go to the Facebook ads library. You can type in anyone one of your competitors. Let's go type in My Fitness Pal. And bang, here are all of their active ads. Right? There's no reason to reinvent the wheel. You should simply look at what is working for your competitors. what is working for companies in your niche. Even if they're not a direct competitor, even if not they're not doing exactly what you're doing in your product, still use them as market research. You can also go onto

9:47Tik Tok and you can type in keywords related to your niche. You can go on Tik Tok or Instagram organically. You can scroll through and you can see exactly what is working in your space and you can use these to inform your ad concepts. Market research is so very important to identify winning formats. You need to have a strong understanding of what is working in your niche before

10:06you spend a single dollar on paid ads. And then once you've identified all these, save them. Save them to a spreadsheet. Put them somewhere where you have them all saved. Right? I had the links to the viral videos in my niche. I had the story time, the the hook, the story lines. I understood intimately what content was working in my space. This will be an amazing resource for you. You want to keep them all in one place. And then once you have done that, once you have identified what the winning formats are, you've done the proper market research, now we can get the content at scale, zero risk. And the

10:40way that we are going to do that is on Posted. The link for Posted is going to be in the description. And there are two ways that you can get content with zero risk or very low risk. The first way is through CPM campaigns, where you only pay creators based on how many views they get. And the second way is through deals. We're going to go through each one of these together. This is the best way to get content at scale without paying anything up front. First, we can dive in to a CPM campaign here. The way CPM campaigns work is you set up a flat

11:09rate per piece of content that you were going to pay and then a CPM rate, the cost per 10,000 views that this creator gets you. You build a brief. This brief is based on the viral concepts that we identified from our competitors on Viral Ads Library or the Facebook Ads Library. we can build a brief based on those concepts and you tell the creators exactly how to make that video for you and for your brand. So, we have the hook, the solution, the secret sauce, the the social proof, and of course, the call to action. There is always a call to action in every single video. You

11:41simply build your brief. You choose where you want the creators to be from. I only want creators from Canada, the United States, UK, Australia, New Zealand. Great. And then the creators will see this brief and they will start to submit. As you can see, we got over 400 pieces of content on autopilot. The beautiful thing is all these creators have to post organically to their own profiles. So these posts all get organic views and you own the video, the Spark Ads code. You own it all in perpetuity outright. So I can download this video and boom, I now have this video and I can upload it directly to my Facebook

12:16ads or Tik Tok ads dashboard. On top of that, I can also track all the stats. I can track the amount of views coming in. I can track the amount of videos submitted, the comments. I can even connect my Firebase analytics or my Google Analytics to see the impact that this organic content is having on my product. Right now, we are tracking the first opens, our first app opens against this organic content. This is how we identify which videos are driving the best results and understand which videos

12:44that we should take and run on paid ads. And what you will end up with is this massive, massive library of content that has been validated organically. You can go through here. You own every single piece of content on here. And you remember what Zuck said, demand for creative diversity. You need as much content as possible when you plan to scale paid ads profitably. And this is the easiest way to get it through CPM campaigns. Now, the other way to get content on posted is through deals. Now,

13:14this is truly risk-f free. Same setup. You create your brief, some rules, you tell posted where you want the creators to be from. But in deals, creators will make content upfront for free, and you only pay for the stuff that you love. As you can see, we got 70 submissions on this one campaign. We declined 52 of them, and we ultimately accepted 16 videos. Same story here. The creators submit the video. They will post organically on their own profile. And again, you own the video and the Spark Ads code to run on paid ads. If you truly want to go risk- free and you only want to pay after you've seen the

13:47content, then deals are the way to go. So, boom. Again, we're building our content library. We own all this. We can download these videos and we can take them and put them on our paid ads dashboard. So, now you understand how to get content in mass with low risk. Volume negates luck. You need to be producing a lot of content and post it is the best way to do that. We now understand the math. Our funnel is

14:11locked in. We understand the framework. We have a library of content that is ready to test on paid. Now, how do we build the campaigns? First things first, if you're running a mobile app, you need to understand that you need proper tracking in place. There's two ways to do that. You can do it through an SDK or an MMP. It is very important to understand the difference between an SDK and an MMP because you can't just launch a campaign for a mobile app and the tracking just works out of the box. With iOS 14, iOS completely locked everything down and now all of the user data is

14:44completely anonymized. So, you have to use one of these two options if you want to be able to track your installs and events in your app correctly. And I'm going to show you the difference between these two. Now, the easier option is to use an SDK. Tik Tok has their own SDK. Facebook has their own SDK. And I even put together a quick Facebook Meta SDK guide. This PDF will also be in the description if you want to download it where we show you exactly how to set up the proper SDKs. But Tik Tok has their

15:16own SDK and Facebook has their own SDK. And they're great for tracking if you only want to run ads or if you're only pushing traffic from one channel. But what you have to understand is Facebook and Tik Tok will try to take credit for the installs and the events that you send on each one of their platforms. And if you have Tik Tok and Facebook running, they will try to take credit for each other's events. So the tracking will not be optimal. You won't really understand where the installs are coming from if you're running each SDK in parallel. Again, if you only plan to run ads on one platform, great. You can use

15:48the SDKs. An MMP, on the other hand, is a mobile measurement partner. The MMPs are independent of the ad platforms, meaning they don't care to take credit for Tik Tok or Facebook. They're just going to show you the results that are black and white. The tracking is a bit more robust here. They're going to understand, okay, this click came from

16:05Tik Tok. This click came from Facebook. This install came from Tik Tok or Facebook, and the tracking is going to be a bit more robust. Again, it doesn't matter if you're only running ads on one of these platforms, but if you plan to run ads on both, it is worth investing in the MMP. Now, the setup is more intensive as well, and these MMPs are expensive. The best MMP out there right now is Adjust. Adjust is the easiest and the most costefficient MMP to set up in your mobile app. So go check them out if

16:34you want to set up tracking with an MMP. So at a bare minimum, you need one of these set up. You can choose which makes the most sense for you. You can have the SDKs and an MMP running. So if you're just getting started, I recommend starting with the SDK and eventually you can upgrade into an MMP. But it's very important that you understand the difference between the two because the only way that we're going to be able to build campaigns that are profitable is to optimize for certain events. And we're going to jump into the campaign setup now. Okay. Once you have the MMP or the SDK in place, your app should be

17:08connected to your Facebook or your Meta Business Manager. Once that's set up, you're ready to start launching campaigns. So, let's create one together. Now, what you'll notice with my campaigns is we were optimizing for many different events. Some events were optimized for free trial, some for install. Ultimately, you need to AB test these different events to see which ones are the most profitable for you. Install campaigns might work, but you might also have to optimize for events that are deeper down in your funnel. You might optimize for a free trial instead of just an install, right? Optimizing for different events at different stages in your funnel is going to change the

17:43ultimate uh return on spend. For example, this was a free trial campaign and this was an install campaign. So, this one was optimizing for free trials and this one was optimizing for installs. As you can see, the cost per install was double on this free trial optimized campaign. But ultimately it ended up being more profitable for us. Even though the installs are more expensive because we were optimizing not just for the install, we were optimizing for the free trial start. We were optimizing for customers, which is great. One thing you absolutely never want to do is optimize only for clicks or landing page views. That is going to

18:19be complete trash traffic, which is why it's important to have an SDK or MMP setup because you will only be able to optimize for install or event campaigns if you have one of these built in. So, with that out of the way, we can start to launch a campaign. What we're going to choose is app promotion. Boom. Once your campaign is set up, of course, you want to name it. We don't need to in

18:41this one. Auction. Great. App promotion. Campaign objective. We want that. And we can show more settings here. And here is where you want to set up your campaign budget. I don't recommend launching with a budget lower than $50. If you're launching with a budget lower than $50, even if you have tracking set up, like you're not going to have enough events

18:59for this campaign to optimize itself. So, you need to spend at least $50 per day. What we're going to turn on next is an iOS 14 plus campaign. This is where you're going to be able to select the app for your campaign. You absolutely have to turn iOS 14 plus on, and you can use the scan network as well. Okay. No special categories here. No need to AB test. We're going to go next. Now, in the ads set is where you can set your performance goal. So, we can choose many different goals here, right? We can choose to optimize for app installs. If you're just starting, I recommend you

19:30start with this. Or we can choose to optimize for different app events. If you choose events, this is where you can start to optimize for the events that you've set up with the SDK or the MMP. You can choose onboarding completed, free trial started, customer purchased, whatever events make the most sense for your specific app in your specific funnel. Okay, we can scroll down. You do not want to set up any further targeting. As Zuckerberg is screaming to us, broad targeting wins. Account

19:58simplification. Consolidate everything. Use broad targeting. We're not going to set up any specific targeting. We're not going to do any complex cost cap bid capping stuff like that. Like, no, just we're just going to leave it completely broad. We're going to let our creative do the targeting for us. So, boom. We don't need a cost per result. Okay, great. We're going to keep scrolling down. dynamic creative. We don't need audience. Here we go. Locations. This is a cheat code. It's going to default to United States only. What you can do is set up Canada at a bare minimum. You

20:30want to choose United States and Canada. The US is the most expensive traffic on Meta on Tik Tok. So, if you can, if your product allows, you can optimize for Canada as well. What we did was we optimized for other tier one countries. to optimize for Australia, we optimize for the United Kingdom, we optimize for New Zealand, Englishspeaking tier one countries. And if you do this, you will greatly reduce the cost of installs. And you can also build different campaigns for each location if you want to AB test the different locations, right? So I recommend you expand a little bit outside of the US to get cheaper

21:06results. Next, very important, the placements. We want to choose which platforms our ads are showing up on. News flash, short form video content doesn't really work on the Facebook Messenger. It doesn't really work on threads. It's not really going to work on the audience network. So, we're going to turn those off. Facebook, of course, will optimize around this and they'll understand that, okay, Facebook and Instagram is where we should show this content. But, you might as well just save yourself some money and turn these off. What you can also do is control the placements. You want to make sure that you don't have any nonvideo feeds on in

21:40the placements. So, boom. This looks good to go. You can leave this checked or not. Allow limited spending to excluded placements. I'm going to turn it off because I don't want them showing anywhere that is not inream for video. And now we're good to go here on the ad set. When it comes to the ads themselves, you're going to need to select your Facebook and Instagram pages. You're going to need to have an Instagram and Facebook setup for your app. Our destination is of course going to be our app. The tracking is already going to be preset for you because you either have the SDK or the MMP. We

22:09should be good to go. Now we can set up the creative. We're going to choose video ad creative setup. Great. And now we can pull in some media here. So boom. We'll pull in our video. Again, you just download all your videos from posted and you can upload them into the meta ads manager. Here you can choose to edit the video. We're going to skip this. Crop the video, whatever. And then here, the primary text, the headline, the call to action. We want our call to action to be install now. Choose whatever works for

22:36you. If you have a game, whatever. Install now is the best for us. And the primary text and the headline text are very important. So simply tell Claude about your product and tell it to build you some primary text and headline text. You do want to put effort into this because on Facebook, on Instagram, the primary text and the headline text do

22:53matter. Okay? And you can add options. Add all of these options. Add all five. Add as many different text variations as possible because Facebook will optimize based on the different text variations that you have. What is converting the best? Okay. Boom. So, you have those in image generation. Honestly, I leave these all on. I leave these all on because Facebook Meta again, let it do its thing. Let it do its thing. They they will build you the best. Like Facebook wants you to get results. Meta,

23:26Tik Tok, they want you to get results. So if you leave all the optimizations on, they will test these. And of course, some of these are going to be super dumb, whatever, but they will optimize ultimately for what is getting you the biggest result or the best result. I leave the enhancements on. Fine. Translations, you can even leave these on. Again, if they're not driving cheap results for you, these won't be turned on in the first place. So, you can leave them on, you can turn them off. I know a lot of people like to turn these off. I leave them on personally. And boom, we're good to go with the creative. Now,

23:57you should always be testing more than one video creative. I recommend testing at least 10 in a campaign. Again, I keep referencing what Zuck is saying here, but demand for creative diver diversity. You need to have multiple different variations of each ad. So, what you can do once you've built your first ad is simply just duplicate. Just duplicate for the uh original campaign. And then you have this copy here and you can simply change the video. You simply change the video. And we're going to choose a different video here. We're going to choose this one. Why not? Bang. Trim, crop, whatever. And we will already have the

24:32primary text and the headline from our other ad. So, perfect. And then we can just go through. And you want to make sure that you have at least 10 ads per ad set. The most important part is the event that you're optimizing for. Optimize for installs, optimize for free trials, optimize for purchases. This is the most important part. This is telling

24:50Facebook, Meta, Tik Tok what you want. And we're going to publish. Now, we've done everything. We've launched our campaigns. Our campaigns are spending. Now, we need to analyze and scale. First things first, again, you need to understand, you need to spend money on paid ads for the ads to work. In the beginning, your ads will not be profitable. Doesn't matter who you are, what ads you're running, how good your creatives are. In the beginning, you are spending money to acquire data. You need the ad platforms to have enough data to understand who your customers are. So in the beginning you are spending to acquire that data. Do not expect it to

25:26be profitable day one even week one. You need to be spending a decent amount of money on each campaign on each ad to understand what is working and for the ad platforms to understand what is working. Now meadow will be very good at optimizing themselves. They will optimize around the creatives that are getting you the cheapest result that you built your campaign around, the cheapest event that you built your campaign around. So, Meta is going to do a good job at showing this to the correct audience. Now, the important thing to understand is the meta ads might be working, but again, your funnel might be completely broken. Let's say you're

25:59getting cheap clicks, but your installs are costing you $50 per install. That's not on meta. It's not on the paid ads. The paid ads are working. You're getting good clicks. Where else is your funnel breaking? Maybe it's on your app store landing page. Is your landing page optimized? Do you have good screenshots? Do you have solid reviews? Maybe they're installing your app, but they're not

26:16getting through your user onboarding. Maybe users are dropping off when they actually install your app, and that's why you're not getting purchases. That's why you're not getting a return on your ad spend. You need to understand if your onboarding is optimized. Maybe they're getting all the way to your payw wall, but your payw wall isn't optimized and the users aren't purchasing. Just because you're running ads on Meta and you're not getting a return on that spend doesn't mean that your ads aren't set up properly. Again, you need to take a holistic view when you start to run paid ads about your product. Maybe you're getting good views, maybe they're

26:48falling off the onboarding, maybe they're not purchasing on the payw wall. You need to test all of these things and ultimately you need to have the proper tracking set up in your product to understand where exactly the funnel is broken. And I promise once you start tracking all these things, you will be able to diagnose and fix your product. This is exactly what I did for PuffC count. I knew I had great content. I knew I had great creatives because the creatives were working for me organically, right? I knew that I was getting clicks to my app. And then what

27:15I started to fix was my user onboarding. I started to AB test my payw wall, AB test different pricing, increase the pricing, lower the pricing. What was getting me the highest LTV? At this point, you're a scientist and you need to AB test everything. New videos, new onboardings, new payw walls. You need to AB test everything so that you can absolutely maximize the CAC to LTV. Now, a little cheat code here is of course you want to turn off the losers. You will identify very quickly, maybe maybe

27:40Meta is spending on the wrong thing. Maybe they're spending on something that's getting you a lot of clicks but not a lot of installs. Simply turn off that ad. But you need to make sure that you're at least spending a decent amount on each ad. I recommend spending at least $100 on each creative before you decide whether to turn it on or off. So, you can simply cut the losers. Turn off the losers. Scale the winners. Always be testing. Always be getting new content on posted. Always be engaging new creators to give you new content. And you will win. If you want direct help from me on setting up your Facebook ads,

28:10scaling your app in general, your onboarding, your payw wall, whatever it is, I set up a school community dedicated for mobile app founders. The link for that is going to be in the description. Join in, shoot me a message, and I'm more than happy to help you on your product. If you watched the

28:26video this far, you probably enjoyed it. I would definitely appreciate a like on the video, subscribe to the channel because I'll be dropping more videos like this all the time, giving as much value away as I can for free. And leave a comment. Let me know what you want me to cover next. I'll see you on the next

28:41one. Paint. [clears throat]