How to Win with Facebook Ads in 2027 (DO THIS)

0:00Seems like everyone's got an elaborate strategy built around the latest hack, but nobody's talking about the easiest win on the board. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly what it is and exactly how to build it in your account today. So, here's what's happening. When you have a campaign for new customers, another for creative testing, another for scaling, retargeting, and retention, every one of those gets broken down again by audiences, interests, lookalikes, age brackets, cart abandoners, video viewers, and so much more. Your ad account ends up looking like a corporate org chart, and on the surface, it looks

0:35smart. Every department has a job, and every audience has a home, but that structure isn't doing what you think it is. A well-organized effort is actually splitting your data into a million different places. Meta learns from conversions and consistency. Facebook Ads is a programming language, and you're not prioritizing teaching the algorithm how to do the work for you. And as a result, none of your campaigns ever settle. Costs always get higher, and results become completely

1:09unreliable. And before you know it, your best ads seem to fatigue, and you start making decisions by looking at retroactive last-touch attribution data, and the choices that seem obvious actually compound the problem. Here's the part nobody talks about. Pull up every campaign you've run over the last 90 days, and sort by cost per purchase. Almost every time, the most efficient one isn't the newest interest stack. It isn't the latest hack. It's some version of retargeting. Showing your ads to people who already know who you are, and here's the problem with that. Most of the people in those audiences have already decided not to buy. You end up spending more time and

1:57on the people you've already lost, while the best audience in your account, the one that's actually driving the results, gets buried under all of it. And this brings me to one of the most common questions I get asked, why does it feel like the more I build and the harder I work, the worse my account gets? Now you know why. It isn't that you're not working hard enough. It's that you're working harder than you should in places

2:25you shouldn't. Across more than a billion dollars in ad spend, my own brands, my clients, my students, this is one of the most common reasons accounts stop growing. It's not bad creative, it's not the algorithm, it's not the economy, it's this. You end up in org chart death. Now, I know what you're thinking. Don't we need marketing for all of the stages of the funnel, top, middle, and bottom? The answer is no, not anymore. Meta's already sequencing ads to people based on where they are in the funnel and their level of intent. The fix isn't a more clever campaign or a more detailed audience split. The fix is the easiest

3:10win on the board and it's been sitting in your account this whole time. Before I show you exactly what it is, I need to show you the one thing about how Meta prices every impression you buy. Because once you see it, everything else I show you in this video is going to click. Here's how it works. Every post on Facebook and Instagram, paid or organic,

3:34is competing for retention in the feed. And every post has a score that Meta calls the estimated action rate. What is more likely to create a lean in experience, and that's the technical term, quite literally, what's going to take from a passive scrolling to like, oh, what's this? Where you lean forward and look at your phone, giving people thumb-stopping content, and your score goes up, and your costs come down. Hammer people with an ad they've already ignored, and your

4:05score goes down while your costs go up. Now, here's why that matters. Cold audiences, the people who don't know you, see your ads less often, and they only see the ads with a high score. You can see this in your account right now. The frequency against your upper-funnel audiences is always lower than everything else. There's more supply than demand at the top of the funnel, which means CPMs are lower. But, you're reaching a colder audience. Warm audiences, the people who already know

4:35you, cost more per thousand impressions. That's the price of premium inventory. But, the important thing isn't the price of the impression. The important thing is what that impression has to do. A stranger has to learn who you are, what problem you solve, and why they should trust you before they'll ever think about buying. You pay for all of that. That is the trust and authority cost. For cold audiences, you're paying that cost on every single person, whether they have intent to buy from you or not, and that tax is what makes those ads more expensive to convert. But, for warm audiences, that cost has already been paid, either with your money or

5:20their time. Your ad doesn't have to introduce you. It doesn't have to build belief from scratch, which is why the cost per acquisition on a warm audience is meaningfully lower. The results you're looking for don't come from the illusion of control that micromanaging the balance of cold and warm audiences gives you. They come from training Andromeda to optimize the balance based on your definition of success. And that's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do today. And it starts as simply as

5:55choosing one of three options. So, if the problem is complexity and micromanagement, the solution has to be the exact opposite, simple and strategic. And that brings us to the most important choice you have to make, and it's actually really easy. If you're willing to admit that your frequency will never be 1.00, then we don't really have audiences. We only have various stages of warm. And that gives us three options. Option number one is customer journey optimization, and here's the thing, Andromeda is already doing it for you. Even in broad targeting, age, gender, and location with no exclusions or 100, the world's most powerful AI at the single task of conditioning human

6:44behavior is taking trillions of data points from billions of people over two decades to figure out the right sequence of ads for each person on its own. Retargeting happens naturally as part of delivery. But if your ads are any good, the majority of your money is spent at the top of the funnel, reaching the people furthest away from the sale who are just starting their customer

7:08journey. And with the simple 4PI analysis, you can see exactly where every ad sits in the funnel, and I'll show you how to do that in a little bit. Option two is funnel-based retargeting. Card abandoners, page viewers, previous customers who opened some email. Each one in its own ad set. Before 2018, before advanced matching, before the power five, back when Facebook was basically just a fancy version of Google Display, this made sense. Someone showed

7:40intent, so you stayed in front of them. But, that was nearly a decade ago when your iPhone still had a circle button on the front of it. And remember, these people already said no. They decided not to buy, or they've already bought from your competitor. If you can convert 2% of this audience, you are elite, which means that you are spending a lot of money to annoy 98% of the most expensive audience you will ever reach. tanks your estimated action rate and spikes your CPMs across the entire account, because they don't want to see your ads. Plus, the people who were going to buy were probably going to do it anyway. And

8:20you're showing them ads on Google and sending them a ton of emails, so your ROAS looks great, but the incrementality of that spend is basically zero. Which brings us to option three. And that is broad retargeting. And this is the one nobody is using. Broad retargeting isn't about finding the people who almost bought, but said

8:40no. It's about reaching everyone who knows who you are and hasn't made a decision yet. It's the choice to leverage everyone who's already paid the trust and authority tax. Some are problem aware, others are solution aware, and some are even offer aware, but they haven't made a choice. The whole funnel exists in this audience. And because they already know who you are, the low frequency upper funnel ads here aren't the equivalent of you trying to stop strangers on the street and beg for money like you see in normal prospecting campaigns. Option number one is efficiency at scale, and it's awesome if you have specific luxury problems. Option two is all but

9:25obsolete, almost nostalgic like MySpace or home phone. Option three is the easiest win on the board, and until it is not enough, it doesn't make sense to do anything else. It's the foundation. In a little bit, I'll show you some real-world case studies where we did straight-up head-to-head accounts set up with different swim lanes for new customers, retention, retargeting, and

9:49all that mess versus doing it this way. But right now, let's get practical. I'm going to show you how to set this up in your Ads Manager, the best ads to use, and how to troubleshoot and scale it. Before we get started, I want to set three clear expectations. One, the creative strategy for this style of campaign is slightly different, and

10:14we're going to cover that in a minute. Two, this is a strategy that's optimal for people who don't need a thousand sales a day to be successful or that have a really big audience. And three, the biggest shifts are actually really simple. So, let's start with the biggest one, and that is the audience. Funnel-based retargeting is all about someone who showed intent and didn't follow through. Broad retargeting is about various levels of warm. We're going to go after three primary audiences, and these are the three I use every single time: website visitors, Instagram engagers, and Facebook page engagers. And one quick note, you'll notice I'm not including followers. And

11:01this is something that has evolved over the years. Followers of accounts is very different from engagers of accounts. The algorithms of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, everything is way more about discovery than loyalty. Odds are you follow way more accounts than you actually see content from. Over the last three or four years, the value of a follower audience, just like the value of a YouTube subscriber, has

11:31dropped dramatically. What actually matters is the people who care enough to engage. If a follower is engaging with your content, they'll be in the engagers anyway. If a follower is ignoring you, leaving them out serves as a natural exclusion of dead traffic. You'll notice all of these are set to 30 days, and that is a deliberate choice. It's the baseline. If I want to scale volume because my efficiency is good, I extend the timeline with a 90-day or 180-day audience. If I need to tighten efficiency, I make it 14 days or even seven. That singular control is all we need to train the machine to find the

12:12right balance between warm and cold. Making the time window shorter scales efficiency. Making it longer scales volume. Your job is to find the right temperature. Win where you can and adjust when necessary. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu taught two principles that apply directly here. First, avoid unnecessary conflict. You don't need to go colder than necessary based on how

12:40many sales you need to be successful. And second, win first, fight later. We're only fighting the battles we can win, which means we're not wasting resources trying to convince people who already said no to change their mind. That's funnel-based retargeting, and I don't care what the return on ad spend is there. The bank account and your CPMs will always say that's a bad idea. Now, the campaign itself. This is a CBO campaign. We're pointing all of our ads

13:09at our hero offer. Objective is sales. We're optimizing for purchase and specifically for the purchase of the thing we're actually trying to sell. Success is not how many times we run the credit card. Success is how many times we sell the hero offer. You need a custom conversion event set up for that specific offer. And here's

13:30how you set it up. This creates a subdivision of purchases based on the content or product ID. That way, it's not just purchases. It's how many of those purchases are the thing you're trying to sell. Believe it or not, you could have over 50% of the sales coming from your ads not be the thing you are promoting. If you pull up your ad account right now, you'll see that the AOV changes every single day across every single ad and every single campaign because you're selling

13:58different things to different people. And the thing that matters most isn't being tracked at all. Going back to Sun Tzu, you're engaging in hand-to-hand combat and never gaining ground. You want your hero offer to be over 50% of the sales you make from your ads, so the machine gets trained to focus on that customer. Andromeda is built to

14:21maintain homeostasis. Whatever happens most often is what it tries to make happen more often. It's a programming language. Your job is to define success and then make sure it happens more often than anything else. We're putting all of these audiences into one ad set. The audiences aren't the various levels of warm, the timeline is. We don't treat site traffic and Instagram engagers as separate. We treat 7-day and 6-months as separate. And I never exclude buyers. If somebody's already bought and they're not going to positively engage with an ad to try to get them to buy again, it would be completely antithetical to Facebook's business model to show them that ad. The

15:04machine will naturally exclude them because it's a bad experience. Meta is not in the business of wasting your money to annoy their users. That doesn't make any sense. If your argument is, "I only have one product and people never buy again." The reason you're going to fail has nothing to do with exclusions or audiences or ad format. It's because

15:26you don't have a business. One product makes you a salesperson. A business is built on cash flow and repeat customers. And there's a very big difference between those two things. If you don't have a business, don't run Facebook ads. You should be on Amazon or Google. So now that we understand how to set this campaign up and why it works, we need to talk about creative strategy because the ads work here differently

15:56and your strategy needs to adjust. The creative strategy for people who've already paid the trust and authority cost is very different from what works in a typical prospecting or retargeting campaign. It really comes down to four content styles. Let's break them down one by one. Content type number one is the product demonstration video. These are excellent for closing the credibility gap. Remember, they already trust you. You already have authority in their space, but they might not fully understand the offer and this overcomes that. And as a video format, these tend to sit higher in the funnel, which means they're doing the work of warming people up to the specific thing that you're

16:46selling, not to you as a brand. That part is already done. The counterpoint to that is the customer review static. These weaponize social proof. They leverage the trust that other people have proven that you are worthy of. And it's not just about five stars. Really good testimonials overcome objections. Whether it's about size and fit, customer service, delivery time, or durability, claims you can't make in your own ad can be made by your customers. Having it in their words as the reason for the review is infinitely more powerful than you trying to tell

17:26somebody else what they should think. Content type three is the direct response static with urgency or scarcity. These are the ads that are meant to motivate somebody to act right now. They sit lower in your funnel and they scale efficiency better than anything else in this stack. And lastly, the long-form mini VSL. Ideally scripted

17:49to address objections systematically. You'd be surprised how often ads that are 3 minutes, 8 minutes, or longer absolutely crush in this context. Because remember, these people already trust you. You already have authority. You being there has already earned their attention. You just have to make that attention worthwhile. The creative's job in broad retargeting is to close the sale. The ad picks up the conversation where your content and the relationship with that warm audience left off. And that is the build. One campaign, one ad set, and four content types. My recommendation is to exclusively run 322 ads for each content type and launch two of each so you can

18:35AB test each execution. There's an optimization strategy for this that we'll cover when we get to 4PI in a little bit. Right now, I want to remind you of something very important. The agency bros who taught you the complex strategy, their goals are not your goals. Your goal is to get enough sales to invest more money in your ads so you can scale the volume of profit in your business, pay yourself, grow, hire people, provide for your family, and gain independence. Their goal is to make the report look good enough so you don't fire them. Their goal has nothing to do with your success. So, with that in

19:14mind, here are two ad accounts. One being run their way and the other run the way that I'm showing you. There are three big things that I want you to pay attention to. First, these ad accounts promote the same offers for the same businesses. They were started at the same time with the same budget, but they

19:32ended at very different levels of scale. Two, their ad account took a couple of hours a day to manage and they launched dozens of new ads every week. And third, something that is harder to show you here, but the day-over-day, week-over-week stability of these ad accounts is incomparable. They would have really good days after they launched other ads and then it would tank. It just went up and down and up and down and was completely unreliable. They just worked harder and harder and harder launching more and more ads just to keep it working. What we did worked early, lost a little bit of ground, and then just got

20:14progressively better. We were directionally improving on a consistent basis and as it did, the budget was raised. You raise the budget, you lose a little bit of efficiency, but we were essentially able to automate the budget going up and just keep the profitability per sale within a little window and as we got more transactions, we just made

20:31more money. The campaign is running. Now, you need to know whether it's working and what to do when it isn't. That's what 4PI is for. The four performance indicators tell you exactly how Meta is using your ads. Meta is not a black box at all and this is what the dashboard looks like. The first performance indicator is spend. This tells you how much the machine is investing in each ad. Spend is earned, not allocated. So, before you look at anything else, look at where the spend is going. Where does the machine want to invest? Remember, Meta is investing to meet their business objective of giving their users a good

21:16experience on the platform. If your goal isn't aligned with their goal, you are going to lose and just going to work harder and harder and harder until the day you give up. The second performance indicator is frequency. This tells you where in the funnel an ad is being used by the machine. Not frequency by week or by month, but the day-to-day

21:37frequency. The lower the frequency, the higher the ad is in the funnel. A daily frequency of 1.05 means roughly 5% of people saw that ad twice in a single day. Now, here's where warm audiences can be misread. A broad retargeting campaign is likely to have a higher daily frequency than an open prospecting one.

22:00But, it's relative to your own account. When you're looking at your account, ask yourself, what is the average daily frequency across everything? Anything below that average is upper funnel. Anything above it is lower in the funnel. That's the only comparison that matters. Mid-funnel is a myth. Performance indicator number three is CPM. This is the price of inventory and really the quality of the experience. On a warm audience, it's going to be higher

22:31than average and we covered why earlier. What you're watching for is a high CPM paired with a weak result. That is a bad ad. And performance indicator number four is efficiency, cost per purchase or whatever you're optimizing for. Any ad with a frequency and CPM above your baseline needs to have a CPA below it. If you're spending money to hit warm people more often and still can't make a sale, it's a bad retargeting ad. And

22:58always add GPT alongside these four. That's AOV minus CPA. It's the profit per transaction on every sale. And here's how to build it. The AOV is a good indicator of customer quality. An ad with a below average CPA and an above average AOV is buying you better customers more efficiently. Any ad where that's not true is wasting money to buy people who aren't worth

23:24buying. Now, here is where you use all of this. Optimization comes down to a simple three-part process. Step one, can you spend more money right now and still be profitable? If the answer is yes, raise the budget. Go straight to scaling. That's it. Don't touch anything else. Step two, if the answer is no to step one, sort your ads by spend. Find any ad spending at least 10% but no more than 40% of the budget where the CPA is above

23:58average and the GPT is below. Remove it. That ad is buying bad customers at an above average price. The moment you remove it, your unit economics get better. You've cost average your profitability up with a single click. And the 40% ceiling really matters. Anything above that will completely change how the campaign performs. So, we

24:20don't touch it. And step three, if you can't raise the budget and there's nothing to remove, only then do we launch new ads. You should know by now whether you have an upper funnel problem or a lower funnel problem. So, launch one strategic 322 split test, meaning two 322 ads of the specific content type that addresses the problem you have, either to scale volume or scale efficiency. If that ad earns spend and performance gets good enough

24:48to increase the budget, it's a winner. Any other outcome is a loss, plain and simple. Can I spend more money tomorrow? That's the only question that matters. I don't care about your ROAS. It's not about how many campaigns you have. It's not about your creative hit rate. It's just that one question. And most advertisers will never build this campaign. Not because it's hard, but because everybody told them the answer was to get more complicated, more segments, more exclusions, more ads. And the harder they worked at it, the more

25:17they kept losing. Today, I've shown you a different way. This is how you win at Facebook. Start here. Until this isn't enough, you don't need to do anything else. Now, here's the honest truth. Watching this video is the easy part. Building it in your own account, picking the right creative, reading the 4 PI, knowing what to do the first time the CPA moves. That's where most people get stuck. And that's exactly what the premium tier of the Disruptor Academy is built for. Every course, every live call, and a community of operators running this at every budget level. The link is in the description down below. And if you want

25:49to know what to do when you max this out, that is exactly what this next video is all about.