# Before you spend more on Meta Ads, watch this Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9NF-6AjQhs Duration: 12 min Language: English Words: 2366 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/E9NF-6AjQhs --- [0:00] so if you're watching this video i'm guessing you're probably struggling to crack meta ads or maybe you spend your meta ads but just not having the impact you would hope so you might be thinking then the answer is a bigger budget telling you you're targeting or you're just desperate for that like one viral ad but there are three levers that aren't cats manager that i think most apps that are scaling at twenty twenty six are pulling account marcus burke the world's foremost expert on scaling with medhat to speed run his playbook so before we get into those three levers let's just start with the basics why even run [0:37] meta ads for your app meta is just one of them main ways for people to discover apps you're in discovery mode on their channel and it reaches a whole bunch of people across all the apps of close to four billion i may use up half of the world population and on top they have a very strong algorithm just because of all the data they gathered which people like or dislike that makes sense half the world scroll being with an algorithm that's a pretty good idea who's actually going to pay for your app but then the question is how much do you need to spend to actually give it a [1:09] real shot so i mean usually people quote the ten k you need a media budget how much that needs to be will be determined by the audience you're buying and how many conversions events you're basically trying to corral the ballpark is always like fifty fifty a week so i would say ten k is rather on the lower end really that means you'll have probably a trial based product that can buy conversion events at like ten fifteen bucks and then ten k is enough if you're a product that is going to have cost per conversion of like fifty bucks plus then rather estimated like five five times of that if not [1:40] more in other the words you need to have some sense of your cost per conversion before you set a budget because that's what decides whether ten k is going to crush it will just be a donation to better talia so once a math checks out and you're ramping up spend the thing that really makes it or breaks it is creative ten years ago scaling a meta met living in ads manager setting up audiences tweaking bids building lookalikes marcus says that job is mostly gone scaling a meta today is more like running a mini content studio to hear him say serious accounts are testing at least twenty five new creatives a week creative [2:19] is targeting is like something every way one has hurt for for a few years now now you put something out and if you kind of say mom on the first screen and there's like someone with a child then you're going to end up targeting moms but in the end meta has so much data to support this and to like help you understand how how to scale it and like them one of the most important ones for me is always the place mid level breakdowns and on top the age level breakdowns for example instagram reals being a very young placement facebook feed being a very old placement so let's say it works and [2:50] you find that ad that converts your first instinct is probably to go find another new ad that's going to crush it but marcus thinks that's where most people get it wrong as soon as you've found something let's say your creative testing like you've found that one kind of tagline that one story that is converting gulf war you then it's going to be very hard to scale just by finding new stories over and over and over the main thing for you to scale will be using that story and bringing it to everywhere that you can put it and as soon as you have some that works like eighty percent of your creative testing of your [3:24] production should be focused on iterations and you're always going to do net new stuff at like twenty percent maybe thirty to figure out like new things but in the end you really want to kind of milk that one thing and figure out how you can bring it everywhere i know that sounds kind of boring but that's a job remixing the thing that actually worked there's just one catch the algorithm telling you which ad one might be lying to you which brings us to our second expert albert tanner who's managed multiple eight figure ad budgets for over a decade and he's seen this one up close you [3:59] launch five ads and within a few days meta it's spending ninety percent of your budget on a single one most people called that one the winner and kill the rest of those ads but that's not what alpert recommends just because algorithm decides to deliver one creative over others doesn't make the other create is bad creative i think there is such a misconception like that particular creative that got the ninety percent of the spend was maybe lucky we call it like lucky five thousand impressions because menta does some sort of decision making around first five to ten thousand impressions and then i've seen that mo multiple times where you take out [4:45] that dominant ad from that ad said and all the other ads like southern the bloom and you're like oh they were also great ads there's an obvious reason meta plays favorites like this they're tipping the scales more toward engagement than perfectly perfectly meeting meeting your business objectives marcus has seen this bias he entire ad budget so meta loves engagement and one engagement means a higher quality score just because that's what they can easily track on the platform that sort of that signals them it's a quality piece of content in the end one classic example here's memes memes always get a ton of engagement because they're deliberately broad so once you throw them [5:23] into it and campaign with stuff that's working they suck up all the spend and your cph skywalker's i've seen it over and over so what do you do about it marcus and alper gift pretty much the same answer you do have to try just the algorithm but you can guide it pull that winning ad into it's own asset to everything else gets room to breathe and then decide up front how much a task is to burn before you kill it i see a lot of accounts with high spend there's sometimes just spending ten k twenty k only to realize oh this is actually another good creative i'm like oh really i could [5:58] tell it after five hundred bucks like look at the data it was already bad like it was already screaming like why did you spend so much and if that all sounds too theoretical upper once audited an account that had spent over one hundred thousand dollars on a single creative with a cost per install of one hundred dollars he would have killed that at like two thousand and ad spent now budgets and ad sets are a blunt way to steer the machine the deeper lever probably the more underrated one is what you tell the algorithm in the first place here's the thing people forget that it really doesn't have much [6:32] of an idea of what your app is all it sees is the events you send back the comet failure case is targeting for installs because they look cheap the traffic that converts is very competitive everyone is bidding for it on their app event optimize campaigns on their value optimize campaigns so the traffic that is left over and is cheap to get a cheap install from is the traffic that doesn't convert and that's what you're going to get if you only optimize for installs i haven't seen a case where an install optimized components got anywhere near the performance of a deeper funnel event in the last i dunno eight years or something but you can [7:07] get burn from the other direction as well upper once audit in an account that was sending all their trail starts as purchases more events strong or signal right all they did was mapping their trial event to trial and the actual cost per trial went down by i think around thirty five percent think about that for a sec at thirty five per cent drop in acquisition costs without touching a single ad because at the end of the day the only thing that really matters is who you're bidding against let's say this brand is optimizing towards purchase because it's a lie is two hundred dollars worth is it [7:45] cosby trials words for your business is fifteen dollars let's say or ten dollars how are you going to compete with a guy who is willing to pay two hundred when you map your trial to trial while you're honest about your kind of intentions and the app because the only way for algorithm to know your business are the events you're sending to your events manager to admit the events manager so the fix is almost funny just tell me the truth like of course you have to be honest but if you're looking for one more signal lever ever there's a tool that used to require a p i access and being [8:20] white listed value rules now it's in the in dui directed on etc level and basically you can on any of the targeting layer say i want to run broadly i'm targeting everyone but age group eighteen to twenty four is worth forty percent less for me because i know they always convert less now than that signal engineering without hiring a data scientist here's the thing and this is a case for a lot of apps out there none of this matters if the real problem isn't your ads okay last one and this is the one that trips a lot of people up what return on ad spend you need before you can really put [8:55] your foot on the gas on promotion campaigns the thing that people strive for like the first milestone is always just getting to profitability on first purchase that you can now spend some money against this and you can start improving the funnel and you have traffic to do so and it's hard to get there and then kind of the advertisers that figure this out on a promotion campaign and pushing people into like a yearly plan so they can collect money quite quickly they may be optimized for something like a ten to fifty percent profit on that first purchase this might sound counter intuitive but at two x [9:28] return on ad spend is probably a signal you're not spending enough here's the example i always use there's an app i've talked to a lot over the years there are tintin isn't omg amazing but it is around thirty percent on an annual basis so if they spend a million dollars this year even if it's just break even that's three hundred thousand dollars in free cash flow next year and then people retain even more that second year so it's hundreds of thousands of dollars a year after that and that's the magic of subscriptions stalking those cohorts year after year but none of that works works unless the funnel holds up which is why [10:03] marcus the guy we brought on to talk about ads actually spends most of his consulting time not on ads a lot of the work is an onboarding because in the end meta is a very distinct channel like people come in they were like tiny attention span they just saw like three seconds of your ad they maybe read the tagline on your first screenshot that's about it they're like super uninformed they're just like hey i'm going to don't know and i'm going to check in the product what it is so ultimately you want to build for that audience most of marcus's client work is focused on onboarding paywalls pricing not ads manager the [10:35] ad is just a front door if the house doesn't convert doesn't matter how good the door looks so to recap those are the three levers your creative the events you send and the funnel underneath it all and that's the job in twenty twenty six not pushing buttons in a dashboard like you were a decade ago but it's taking a more whole stick approach to the growth of your app one last thing and it might be the biggest money saver of this whole video some apps just aren't going to work on meta so sometimes you just need to stop throwing good money after bad and look for a new channel marcus's filter [11:10] for what works on meta is that you gotta have some kind of a visual hook that's going to stop someone doom scrolling on their couch a food scanner that counts calories with a photo bats a magical video hook a vpn maybe but nobody's really thinking about that while they're doing scrolling when they need one they just search the app store it's why i'd never run meta ads for the habit tracker i've i've coded it was a fun project inspired by my kids but it totally fails that filter thanks again to markets and alper for jody beyond the show and sharing so many great insights you can check out their full [11:44] episodes they'll be links down in the description and don't forget to do all the youtube stuff give us ally give help subscribe we also do live shows every thursday at nine am pacific eighteen hundred central european time time where we bring experts like marcus and alperon and you get to ask them questions hope to see you there --- About 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