# The 5 Biggest Meta Ads Mistakes Apps Make (And How to Fix Them) Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4cahCIrIgY Duration: 6 min Language: English Words: 1327 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/G4cahCIrIgY --- [0:00] Definitely, it's still very common to like in the end optimize just for a trial and believe the machine is going to do the job and that's definitely something that's the biggest challenge for subscription app operators that do rely on trial because ultimately the whole business model demand at least if you don't have like cash flow from other apps then business model demands you to push people into a 12-month so you can recollect that money. On the other hand then you add a trial on top just to lower the friction to get into it and then anyone takes that trial and not everyone wants to convert so you end up [0:32] with a very messy signal and that's usually what you have to deal with in the early days and work around with value rules with trying to figure out hey what types of messaging in the end drive a quality user and not just cheap trials. So you really can't rely on the machine doing a great job just because it doesn't get the signal to do so. Like it doesn't have context, it doesn't know who's [0:51] converting. It only looks at what's a cheap trial and that's not necessarily good trial. So that's the biggest challenge and still the biggest mistake that I see people making that they let meta do the job that they need to be doing at that point. Um [snorts] some other ones are yeah but I mean moving even more up a funnel and events I still see some people like trying to run like install optimized campaigns or stuff like the the more you choose a like poor conversion signal the more you're going to get of that um kind of traffic and ultimately the traffic that converts is very competitive. Everyone is bidding for it [1:28] on their app event optimized campaigns on their value optimized 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. Um I I haven't seen a case where an install optimized campaigns got anywhere near the performance of a deeper funnel event in the last [1:51] I don't know eight years or something. Um so I wouldn't recommend to do so. I also wouldn't recommend to test your creatives against it. Maybe that's a good other mistake. In the end, what that means is you're testing your creatives against an audience that is completely different. It's different people that care about different stuff, and you're only trying to get them to a cheap install. And then that doesn't necessarily port to your [2:13] to your trial campaigns or other events. So, in the end, make sure you're testing in a relevant bucket so that also your wins are portable to your business as usual campaigns. It's always a bit of a like balancing things out. Of course, you also want to test cheaply. I get that. Like if you test only in the US against your real goal in an old audience, then testing is very expensive. So, then it's always the question, "Well, how can we remain in a relevant audience while bringing down prices?" And you could think about, "Well, let's move to Canada." Often like 50% cheaper in CPMs, very close to the [2:47] US audience. Might be a good way to test. Some brands that are like really high velocity at high velocity testing, they move into even tier three markets. It's like Philippines, Indonesia, are usually quite interesting. In the end, I would urge you to like when you move your testing to a different place or a different pricing or a different algorithm, then in the end you want to measure whether that stuff still maps to what you're doing. So, when you found some winners on that new setup, try to bring them over, see if they actually win, and whether kind of your that match [3:17] rate degrades with the new setup or not. Don't just kind of move everything over and suddenly you're basically recording the wrong results. That can create quite the quite the mismatch there. Um Yeah, what else? Um I There was a good one we had here in the notes. Over-relying on one creative style, like generic UGC. Yeah, true, true. That's a good one. Um Yeah, as I said before, in the end, the creative styles you're using are determining the placements you end up on, and UGCs are just made for these Reels placements. It's always going to deliver mainly on Instagram Reels and a little bit on Facebook Reels. If you If your ads or like if [3:56] your app already has kind of an older topic, I worked with like a sleep app before. Of course, sleep is rather relevant to older people. It's not much of a problem when you're like 20, then the topic can determine placement as well just because older people are on Facebook and then maybe you see more delivery on Facebook [4:11] feed, but generally UGC goes on Reels. And that means if you only do UGC, you never tested a different placement. Maybe your conversion would be 50% better if you ran on Instagram feed. You just don't know. So, ultimately like make a lot of diverse creatives, especially early on, so that you're not working in a local maxima where it's like, "Oh, I need to do UGC because it's the content type on socials." And you're kind of everyone is doing it. Often times people look out for like D2C advertisers who only do UGC, but it's [4:40] not the case for for apps necessarily. So, test diversely early on to figure out, well, where do I see the best traction? And then you need to focus a bit, of course, because otherwise like you can't be making creatives in a ton of styles all the time, but at least do some broad testing early on to figure out like what does my performance look like in these different placements. And then again, that testing can inform your like how to grow the account once you found your working message. Then once it's like, "Okay, we have something that is profitable um or even kind of uh making us a good return." Then you can [5:14] go back to that and figure out, "Oh, look at this kind of my statics delivered in this place. Let's put that message on a static and see if we can get the same behavior with the message we now know is converting. Um yeah, that's why it's so important. And the other thing the other mistake with this is for me kind of over consolidating the account and letting Meta in the end highly concentrate your spend. Um so, often times they will end up spending 90% of budget on like two ads in an ad set, um no matter how many you put in. And that means if you put in all of them, [5:45] then that means you're going to run with two ads. And since creative is targeting, that means you're only targeting that audience which is behind that creative. And that's niche. Like, just because you're targeting broad doesn't mean you're actually reaching a broad audience. It means you have to kind of make sure you do. And that's where to me kind of using your architecture comes in and you're basically pulling creatives out, putting them in their own ad sets so they [6:08] actually get a chance to spend. Um so that you're more diversified, meaning you're able to scale. And also things won't be as volatile because as soon as your hero ad dies in an ad set uh at 90% of the spend, then you're in trouble. You're not if you have like six ad sets and they all have their hero ad. --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts. Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt