Going broad, doing lookalikes, what should you do?

Hey there! 👋

Coming off a very busy week with a lot of new projects to work on. Excited, and overwhelmed, but wouldn’t want to have it any other way. We keep pushing and our foot on the gas.

I don’t know what it is but in periods where we have a lot of work to do we usually do best and don’t get complacent as it pushes us as a team to grind out whatever we need to do on top of our current work.

Extremely grateful for our team of media buyers, content editors and other third parties that help us do what we do! You know who you are!

So this week I want to touch on why every ad account is different and you should not take the advice you see on Twitter and LinkedIn for gospel and believe it’s the end all be all.

I’ve seen countless accounts over the last few months and while everyone is preaching to having a very simplified structure and only using CBOs or ASC+ campaigns is nice but is far from the truth of what will be working for you.

I have seen many accounts where ABO is outperforming a CBO structure as it focuses more on isolated testing, but then I am seeing other accounts where the CBO structure is crushing. I find it therefore super dangerous to look at Twitter or LinkedIn and see other people post their “Success setup to get to 7-figures in month spend” and believe I need to test it too. Every ad account will behave differently, from creatives to ad account structure, to campaign type. There is no one-way ticket to greatness here.

What I will say is that we tend to be very cautious when our ad accounts get more complicated, we tend to want to explore the most out of every product category for every client, but not every product is suited towards paid ads. The profit margin might not be there, the LTV might not be there for it to be an effective product to drive scale in 30, 60 or 90 days. So basically identifying which products to focus on with your ads also will help you simplify your account as you will have fewer campaigns to build in order to want to try everything that your store offers. Secondary products will have to be promoted elsewhere when the numbers don’t add up like in backend email flows or through organic efforts.

Only after we have found which SKUs are suitable for paid ads we launch ads for them. We do tend to split out a certain collection in a separate campaign so we can push each offer through its own campaign to not let them interfere with each other as a different offer usually can have a different demo. 99% of the time the set up would look something like this:

1. Main campaign - CBO (with exclusions of past purchasers)

2. ASC+ Campaign (where we move winners)

3. Retargeting (if applicable) (Excluding all past purchasers)

4. Cost/bid cap campaign (here we put our winners too and experiment with different cost- and bid caps to find more scale at a more efficient rate.

As I mentioned, please do not copy and paste this structure as it might not work for you. And a more important point is that you can basically ditch this whole structure if your creatives are not working in any structure because if you bring it back to basics if your creative game is strong and appeals to your target demo your ads will work in any structure. One might be more efficient than the other, but let’s be honest, ads are just putting our messaging in front of people on social channels through video or image form. It’s not more complex than that.

I think I’ll leave it there. Don’t make everything more complex than it needs to be. If you are feeling overwhelmed with this whole ads and marketing thing, just go back to basics and think to yourself I am just trying to convey my message to my audience through ads, nothing more, nothing less.

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That's a wrap!

This was one from the heart and I think will be valuable to anyone running ads for their brand or their clients and further confirms its all about human psychology and your messaging and not about how your account is structured.

See you next week at 7 PM CEST.

All the best,

Dennis 💚

P.S. On Twitter? Follow me here for daily value bombs about eCommerce and DTC!