Modern Creator
Daniel Iles · YouTube

The Complete 2026 Meta Ads Blueprint

A 58-minute course on why the creative is the targeting — and every other Meta ads variable is secondary.

Posted
yesterday
Duration
Format
Tutorial
educational
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1.1K
67 likes
Big Idea

The argument in one line.

Meta's AI now uses the words and visuals inside your ad to match it to the right audience, which means the creative is the targeting — and writing a precise, behavior-specific script delivers more results than any audience configuration in the ads manager.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…
  • A service-based business owner spending on Meta ads with inconsistent results who suspects the problem isn't budget.
  • A coach or agency founder who wants a first-principles paid acquisition framework grounded in real account data.
  • Someone who has been burning budget on audience targeting variations and split-testing ad sets without seeing meaningful lift.
  • A content creator who can make organic content but hasn't systematically applied those principles to paid ads.
SKIP IF…
  • You need a hands-on technical tutorial for Business Manager, pixel setup, or retargeting audiences — this video intentionally excludes that layer.
  • You're in healthcare, finance, or insurance — the presenter explicitly defers to industry-specific compliance research for regulated niches.
TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Meta's move to AI-driven contextual targeting means the algorithm reads your ad's actual words and visuals to decide who sees it — making creative quality responsible for roughly 90% of ad performance. The presenter teaches a four-part direct-response script (behavior-callout hook, First/Next/Then mechanism, specific proof, single CTA), explains why angles must be validated before building variation libraries, and provides a KPI reverse-math model (LTV → CAC → cost per call) to set rational spend thresholds before launching. The video closes with a compliance checklist and the counterintuitive rule that cutting a struggling ad is almost always the wrong move — lowering budget first usually restores performance.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:0001:32

01 · Cold open / credibility

$1M/month ad spend, hundreds of client accounts. Positions the course as real-world operator knowledge, not academic theory.

01:3202:51

02 · The offer problem

Most ads fail because the offer that converts warm audiences fails on cold traffic. Model proven winners instead of reinventing.

02:5107:22

03 · Meta's 3 priorities + creative thesis

Users > Meta revenue > advertisers. Creative is 90% of strategy. Ads that look like content win because they align with the platform's user-first mandate.

07:2210:51

04 · Organic-first testing

Build a free creative library organically first, then scale what already resonates. Facebook Ads Library as a 5-minute competitor research shortcut.

10:5117:43

05 · Contextual targeting (Andromeda update)

Meta's hidden AI uses in-ad language and visuals to match audiences — the public targeting UI is years out of date. Specific slang reduced CPL by 20% in a real test.

17:4325:57

06 · Ad scripting framework

Four-part framework: Hook (behavior callout), Mechanism (First/Next/Then), Proof (1-2 specific client results), CTA (one action). Copy and headline are secondary — 95% of effort goes to the video.

25:5733:44

07 · Angles vs. variations

Angle = different market desire. Variation = different execution of same angle. Validate angles before building variation libraries — spending $200K on the wrong angle is a real cautionary tale here.

33:4441:38

08 · Campaign structure + KPIs

Fewer campaigns outperform complex accounts. KPI reverse math from LTV → CAC → cost per call. Budget 3-5x KPI before judging an ad. Wait at least a week.

41:3846:28

09 · Scaling and budget dynamics

Scaling past optimal spend triggers diminishing returns by law. Small-budget targeted ads are often more profitable. Never cut before lowering budget first.

46:2850:04

10 · Ad ID / social proof stacking

Copy the unique post ID across campaigns to pool likes and comments instead of splitting social proof across duplicate assets. Old viral ads with 10k+ likes beat fresh resets.

50:0457:54

11 · Compliance rules

Checklist to avoid bans: link integrity, truthful headlines, ad-to-LP match, no before/after photos, no income claims, no assumed personal attributes, proper account hygiene, two payment methods on autopay, account seasoning.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

  • Meta's Andromeda update means the audience-targeting UI is years out of date — real targeting happens inside the ad's words and visuals.
  • Calling out a behavior instead of a demographic ('if you're struggling to film and post all your content yourself') gets the same person to self-identify without sounding like an ad.
  • Mentioning names like Alex Hormozi in your script tells Facebook to show the ad to people who follow Hormozi — you get interest targeting without selecting it.
  • An ad running for multiple months in a competitor's account is proof of a profitable angle — it means six figures of testing already validated it for you.
  • The First, Next, Then mechanism works because the single biggest reason cold traffic doesn't buy is they can't visualize how the process would work for them specifically.
  • Your organic content library is a free creative testing bed — your best ads should start as organic posts that already outperformed before you put money behind them.
  • Consolidating campaigns gives Meta more data per campaign, finds converting audiences faster, and costs less per result — the complex 15-campaign account is fighting the algorithm.
  • Budget three to five times your target KPI before judging whether an ad works, and always wait at least a week for the data to be meaningful.
  • Copying the same ad post ID across campaigns pools social proof instead of splitting it — a 10,000-like ad gets preferential treatment in the auction.
  • Copy and headlines matter so little that one agency ran the same two headlines for $5 million in ad spend without meaningful performance variance.
  • An ad that performs at $1,000/day may break entirely at $2,000/day — pulling back to the profitable threshold often restores results immediately.
  • Profit margins get worse as you scale, not better — scaling before margins are solid compounds the inefficiency.
Takeaway

The creative is the targeting — everything else is secondary

WHAT TO LEARN

Meta's AI reads the language inside your ad to decide who sees it, which means writing a precise, behavior-specific script is now more valuable than any audience configuration you build in the ads manager.

01Cold open / credibility
  • Context and credibility should front-load a tutorial — establishing why the presenter has earned attention before teaching is what separates useful education from generic content.
02The offer problem
  • An offer that converts referrals and warm audiences almost never converts cold traffic — they require different framing, not just more budget.
  • Modeling what already works in your market is faster and cheaper than testing novel angles from scratch.
03Meta's 3 priorities + creative thesis
  • Ads that look like content outperform ads that look like ads because the platform rewards what users want to watch — working with the platform costs less than fighting it.
  • Creative quality is responsible for approximately 90% of ad performance; targeting, copy, and campaign structure are the remaining 10%.
04Organic-first testing
  • Organic content is a free creative-testing environment — high engagement rate, high completion rate, and strong hook performance are leading indicators that an ad will work before you spend a dollar.
  • The Facebook Ads Library is the most underused competitor research tool available — five minutes there can replace months of paid testing.
05Contextual targeting (Andromeda update)
  • Meta's AI uses in-ad language and visuals to match audiences, which means the public targeting UI is largely legacy infrastructure.
  • Using slang and jargon specific to your niche — words your actual customers use among themselves — improves both platform delivery and viewer attention simultaneously.
06Ad scripting framework
  • Calling out a behavior instead of a demographic in the hook ('if you're struggling to film and post all your content yourself') makes the same person self-identify without triggering ad-recognition defenses.
  • The mechanism (First, Next, Then) is the most important structural element of a cold-traffic ad — it removes the primary objection (I can't see how this would work for me) before the CTA.
  • Proof in an ad should be tight (one or two specific client results with names and numbers) — detailed case studies belong on the landing page or sales call.
  • One CTA, simply stated, outperforms multiple options — the goal is to make the next step obvious, not give the prospect a menu.
07Angles vs. variations
  • An angle targets a different desire in the market; a variation executes the same angle differently — confusing the two leads to building 100 variations of an angle that was never validated.
  • Establishing winning angles before building out variation libraries prevents the most expensive mistake in paid ads: spending six figures proving that a core positioning doesn't resonate.
08Campaign structure + KPIs
  • Fewer, cleaner campaigns give Meta more data per campaign and produce better delivery at lower cost — a two-campaign account can outperform a fifteen-campaign account running the same ads.
  • Working backwards from lifetime value to cost-per-booked-call gives you a rational spend threshold before judgment, replacing emotional 'this isn't working' decisions with math.
  • Budget three to five times your KPI cost and wait a full week before evaluating an ad — shutting off at $200 after three days restarts the algorithm's learning phase every time.
09Scaling and budget dynamics
  • Every ad has an optimal spend level where each dollar is maximally efficient — scaling past that level triggers diminishing returns by economic law, not by bad targeting.
  • Small-budget, narrowly targeted ads that only spend $50/day can be as profitable as or more profitable than high-budget 'monster' ads, and both have a place in a healthy account.
10Ad ID / social proof stacking
  • Reusing a winning ad's post ID across campaigns and ad sets consolidates social proof instead of splitting it — an ad showing 10,000 likes everywhere it runs gets preferential treatment in the auction.
  • Older ads with significant engagement history can outperform newer, higher-quality creatives simply because of accumulated social proof — which is an argument for patience over constant creative refresh.
11Compliance rules
  • The most common ban triggers are preventable in five minutes: check all links before launch, match ad content to landing page content exactly, and never put income claims in the creative.
  • Setting up two payment methods on autopay and calling your bank to whitelist Facebook charges eliminates one of the most common early-stage account shutdowns.
  • Seasoning a new ad account by spending its daily limit on approved ads for several weeks before scaling is the only way to raise spend caps — there is no shortcut.
Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Contextual targeting
Meta's AI-driven system that uses the words, graphics, and signals inside an ad creative to match it to relevant users — distinct from the manual audience selection options visible in Ads Manager, which the presenter describes as years out of date.
Andromeda update
Meta's internal algorithm update that significantly expanded hidden contextual targeting capabilities while leaving the public-facing audience selection UI unchanged, giving advertisers who understand it an advantage.
Ad angle
A fundamentally different positioning of an offer that targets a different desire or market segment — for example, selling the same product as a family treat versus a health supplement. Requires validation before building variations.
Ad variation
A different execution of the same angle — same audience, same core claim, different hook or explanation. Used to keep a winning angle fresh and extend its lifespan in an account.
Ad ID (post ID)
A unique identifier Facebook assigns to each ad as it appears on the platform. Reusing the same ID across campaigns preserves accumulated likes, comments, and shares rather than resetting social proof with each new placement.
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
The total ad spend required to acquire one paying customer. The presenter benchmarks a healthy CAC at no more than 30% of customer lifetime value for service businesses.
Account seasoning
The process of spending a new ad account's daily limit on approved ads consistently over weeks to build trust with Facebook and gradually raise the account's spend caps before attempting to scale.
First, Next, Then
A three-step ad scripting framework for explaining how a service delivers results: step one (what happens first), step two (the middle), and the outcome. Designed to make an abstract offer visualizable for cold audiences.
Resources

Things they pointed at.

04:55productViral Coach Masterclass on Skool
18:09channelAlex Hormozi / Acquisition.com
18:20channelSam Ovens / Skool
Quotables

Lines you could clip.

04:19
The single best thing you can do when making an ad is make the ad worth watching on its own.
Standalone thesis — no setup needed, directly actionableTikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
07:22
If your ads aren't good, none of the other stuff like targeting is actually gonna save you.
Direct pattern interrupt for anyone obsessing over targetingIG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
14:21
The words you say, the graphics you use — the other parts of your video — are doing the targeting for you, and it's scary good.
Reveals the mechanism of contextual targeting in one sentencenewsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
02:51
Originality, especially on cold traffic, is extremely expensive. But modeling a clear winner is very smart.
Counterintuitive permission slip for modeling competitorsTikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
42:59
Before you cut a previously winning ad, you should at least try to lower the budget first.
Specific tactical rule most advertisers don't knownewsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

analogystory
00:00Last month, we turned a million dollars in ad spend into multiple millions of dollars of revenue for our business. And on top of doing this ourselves, we actually also see what happens every single day in hundreds of client accounts. So relative to most other people talking about advertising on the Internet, we have a lot of context.
00:17And my goal is to shortcut years of learning and millions of dollars of ad spend that it took for us to get here and just tell you exactly what works right now rather than what worked years ago, which is what most seasoned media buyers still rely on. So whether you're trying to scale from zero to over $1,000,000 per month in revenue in under a year just like we did, or if you just wanna stop wasting money on ads that don't actually convert, this will hopefully get you one step closer.
00:41Because after scaling a massive company myself and helping hundreds of clients do the same, I believe one of the most powerful skills in business is being able to just buy more clients whenever you need them. Now, this course won't have any technical tutorials on setting up your business manager or pixels or retargeting audiences.
00:58The back end of all of that stuff changes often enough that a video filmed today, it's probably gonna be outdated tomorrow. But Facebook has great documentation on this. And if you're working with my team, of course, they're just gonna handle all of that technical setup for you.
01:09Instead, what this aims to be is everything else that you won't find on the Internet with a quick Google search. Because very few people have profitably scaled a company to several million dollars a month using both paid and organic working together.
01:25And as far as I'm aware, no other company at that level is willing to be this open about what is actually working right now. But before I show you how exactly we run the ads that work so well, there's one thing that I wanna discuss that kills campaigns before they even start. And it has nothing to do with targeting or budget or the creative that you're actually running.
01:45Most businesses that fail at running ads blame all of those things, but the real problem is almost always the offer. Because what converts your warm audience, that amazing offer that works on referrals or past clients or people that already know, like, and trust you, stuff that your grandma would buy? That rarely works for strangers seeing you for the very first time from a cold ad.
02:08But if you can figure out how to present your offer to cold audiences, your business essentially becomes infinitely scalable. You can literally buy as many customers as you want.
02:18And the fastest way to nail the offer and have it work on a cold audience is just to model what's already working in your industry. And I know what you're thinking, like, won't I just look like everyone else doing the same exact thing? No.
02:28Because the company's doing millions of dollars a month selling something similar to what you have or what you want to sell have already spent millions of dollars testing what cold traffic already wants. They found proven demand and they've created their offer around it.
02:42So your job isn't to reinvent everything from scratch, it's just to understand what worked for someone else and then be able to make it your own. Originality, especially on cold traffic, is extremely expensive.
02:54But modeling a clear winner is very smart. And every single week on on client calls, hear the same thing like, we're still refining our offer. We're still pivoting the offer.
03:02Figuring out deliverables. Stop. If that's you, stop right now.
03:05Now to be successful with ads on Meta specifically, you have to understand that Meta, I'll call it Facebook, has three priorities. The first priority is user experience. The platform is not built for you, the advertiser.
03:17It is built for its users. And so Facebook's entire business model depends on people scrolling and watching, and then coming back to do the same thing later today.
03:26And they will do whatever it takes to protect that. And what this means practically is that Facebook rewards ads that people actually want to watch and punishes everything else. So better creatives that people wanna watch will mean lower costs per click, lower cost per lead, more reach with the ad spend that you do spend, whereas worse creatives means that you're paying a premium to interrupt people scrolling who don't even want to see you.
03:49And this is why clickbait hooks and lazy, like, AI generated images and poorly edited videos kill your efficiency. They convert terribly as ads, and they're extremely expensive to run even if your targeting and your messaging and your offer are perfect. And the single best thing that you can do when making an ad is make the ad worth watching on its own.
04:09Make content so good that people wouldn't skip over it even if they knew it was an ad. Think about the Super Bowl commercials. People look forward to those, and they watch them voluntarily because they are generally well made commercials.
04:21And when you can do that, Facebook becomes your partner in this. And if you think about a perfect social media platform, it would have no ads. So if your ads don't look like ads, if they look like content, the platform would love promoting your stuff.
04:34Otherwise, if you make stuff that blatantly looks like an ad, you are fighting the platform every single dollar you spend, and it'll be very expensive for you. And mastering this organic ad strategy is gonna be the core focus of this course because it is the single most important thing in scaling ads.
04:49This is your mid course interruption announcement. You're only gonna get one of these, and it's that this course is only a small baby part of the entire big old thing that we got down in the description.
05:01If you click down below, it's on school. It is the Viral Coach masterclass. It's got this entire masterclass plus a whole bunch of assets that come with it plus a whole bunch of other masterclasses on how we built up our business and software and downloadable stuff.
05:17And I don't even know why I need to keep listing things for you. You should just trust me by now. You're watching the video.
05:22Just believe me. Take my word for it. Click down the link below, join the group, and then get access to all of the other extra stuff.
05:29Am I missing anything? Free. Oh, it's free.
05:32Holy smokes. Alright.
05:38Still here. Alright.
05:42Well, I'll let you just watch it here then. Now Meta's second priority, after its viewers, is generating income from Meta with advertising. Last year, 98% of their revenue came from running ads on their apps like Facebook and Instagram.
05:57And their third priority, after their viewers and making money, is advertiser success. So we are an afterthought, but they do want us to be somewhat profitable so that we at least keep spending more money with them.
06:08Because if running Facebook ads wasn't profitable for anyone, no one would keep paying Facebook their $200,000,000,000 per year, and the entire meta business would go under. They don't want that, so they have to at least have some of us continuing to come back and and paying them every single month.
06:22And so with those three incentives understood, let's talk about making the most profitable ads possible. In the last few years, marketing on Facebook has actually changed a lot.
06:31The biggest shift that's happened is that creative, the actual video, is now the most important part of the entire strategy. And that's the asset that you upload. Whether it is a video, or a still image, or a carousel, or a dozen of other variations of media that you can run as the actual ad.
06:46But what you run as an ad is way more important. This is where 90% of your focus should go. Not the audience targeting, not the color that you use on your ad or your landing page, not a million different split tests.
06:58Just make sure you have a very good creative. Something that is worth watching whether you put money behind it or not. Because if your ads aren't good, none of the other stuff like targeting is actually gonna save you.
07:07And I say this from experience because when we first started running ads, I really didn't know what I was doing on the media buying side. I had terrible landing pages. I'd never run Facebook ads.
07:16The campaign setups were like super messy. The tracking the tracking hardly worked. All the split testing I did was like inconclusive, and we still won.
07:23And what actually saved us and really allowed us to scale from zero to a million dollars per month in revenue in under a year was that we already knew how to make content. I had millions of followers on social media. I knew what good organic content looked like.
07:37We had made ads for brands like PayPal, Amazon, Doctor Pepper. Like, I was in the ad. I wrote the script.
07:42I filmed the video, and then I gave it to those massive brands, some of the biggest brands in the world. If I didn't have that experience, I definitely, honestly, would have gone out of business. And that is how much it matters to nail the creative.
07:53The ad is the very first touch point that a prospect has with your business. Before they see your funnel, before they watch your VSL, before the automations, before your emails, before the checkout page, before any of that stuff, it is the ad. So if you are half baking the ad and spending hours optimizing everything else, you have it completely backwards.
08:11And the ad that you make has to accomplish a few things. For our business, a service based business that's working one on one with business owners to improve their social media marketing, we knew that our ads specifically had to do three things. First, give a cold audience a very clear picture of what we do.
08:26So we have to demonstrate a high level of social proof and look professional on social media. Because we sell social media marketing, like our content on social media has to look better than everyone else's. We couldn't show up with mediocre ads and expect people to hire us to make content.
08:40Like, the ad had to be the proof itself. And so this created an incredibly high standard for us. It's actually one of the reasons why I think our ads have been so incredibly profitable is we don't put out anything that looks bad.
08:52Whereas most other marketing agencies can't afford to run ads themselves at all and have to scale through word-of-mouth and referrals because despite knowing all the back end targeting and campaign setups and automations, they can't nail a good ad. Now, not all industries like ours in marketing are as competitive.
09:10So your specific goals might look a little different, but the principle with what you need to accomplish in the ad stays the same. Your ad needs to be some of the highest quality content that your company puts out. It can't be an afterthought.
09:21It needs to earn attention from your audience, establish credibility really quickly before anyone clicks anything. And to do that is incredibly difficult. The formats and the variables that you use are always different.
09:32We'll get into specifics in a little bit. But after seeing an ad, a complete stranger should know exactly what you do, how you can help them, and have a reason to believe you. And this is why before you spend any money on testing creatives in ads, we always recommend that you post content organically on social media first.
09:48It is a free way to test which hooks get views, which topics that you talk about actually drive engagement and are interesting to your audience, which formats people watch to the end to where you're gonna have your CTA in an actual ad. And our most profitable ads have gone through all of that testing.
10:05They didn't actually start as ads. Our most profitable ads started as organic posts. They outperformed everything else.
10:10They had higher engagement rates, higher view rates. And when you find something that resonates without paying for distribution, because you've done your testing completely for free, you don't have to have a testing budget. You can then put budget behind it and let Facebook do all the rest of the winning for you.
10:24So my recommendation for almost everyone is to build the creative library first for free, and then run ads from a position of already knowing what works. That'll always be the highest ROI to scale ads in the big picture. But the fastest way to scale ads comes from modeling successful formats.
10:38So five minutes of market research here that we can do will shortcut you months of organic testing for you right out the gate. You can see exactly what your competitors are running for ads by going to the Facebook ads library, which we'll do really quick. We're gonna go Facebook ads library.
10:54It's this very top one here, And we're gonna look at all of the ads. Now once you're in here, you're gonna wanna search up some of your competitors.
11:02And not necessarily by their business name. Like, you look up Viral Coach, nothing shows up. But you're gonna look them up by their Facebook page name.
11:09For example, I go under Daniel Isles, and then here is my report on the Meta Ads Library showing 590 active ads. And you can just scroll through and see all of the ads that I'm running right now.
11:22So if you were one of my competitors, this would give you incredible amount of clarity into what is working for me right now on the ad side. You can literally copy all of my stuff. And not only the video ads, which you can actually watch, but also the headlines I use, all of the copy here, you can read through and copy it word for word, as well as look at the landing pages that I'm sending this traffic to for every single ad that every single competitor of yours is running.
11:46And one of the most important things that you can pay attention to of all of these is when that ad started running. So you can scroll through all of these here and see that some of these ads have been on since early December for me. Why would I leave an add on for multiple months in a row?
12:02Well, it's definitely not because it's bad. If a competitor of yours has the same ad running for multiple months straight, six months, a year, what that means is it's a winning angle, and that's why they keep spending money on it is because it's successful over a long period of time. So when you find these ads that have been running for long periods of time, study them.
12:18Who is in the video? What does it look like? Is it a professional TV commercial or is it organic social media friendly?
12:24You can look at all these different parts of the ad and understand that you are looking at a creative that probably has tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. In our case, with this ad specifically, almost a million dollars in budget behind it proving that it works. This is testing that your competitor paid for, so that you don't have to.
12:42It's a proven creative, model it. And before you move on to the next video here, please do this as a quick exercise.
12:47Look up just one competitor and one of their ads that's been running for a long time. Look at the headline, which is this little bit of text right here that shows up in most placements. Just skim the copy.
12:57You don't even have to read all of it. What are some of the big words that stand out to you here? And then just watch the video all the way through one time.
13:04Just be aware of what you are competing against. Understand the video. How would you remake the ad to potentially be even better?
13:12And then you can even go and copy the link to this ad and save it for later so that you can remake that ad in your own style after going through the rest of these videos. This market research will become your creative foundation. You can combine elements from different parts of ads in the ad library.
13:29You can make slight tweaks to them, build your own dozen different angles of ads and copy that are already proven to work because someone else has spent millions of dollars testing them. Now, before we get into making your ads, I wanted to share something important about how Meta actually distributes these ads because it changes everything about how you write your scripts, what you include in the visual elements.
13:49A few years ago, Facebook got into serious trouble for how advanced their targeting had become. Consumers were upset that Facebook knew more about them than they knew about themselves. And since users, again, on that hierarchy of priority, the users come first, Facebook knew that they had to do something about it.
14:04But the targeting was working really well. And for Facebook and advertisers, which are their second and third highest priorities, they were making a lot of money.
14:12So they couldn't just kill this hyper specific targeting. So instead of admitting that the targeting was insanely good and that they were gonna get rid of it, they just stopped updating the public facing targeting options.
14:23But they secretly kept developing a more powerful targeting behind the scenes. And so it's just not visible to advertisers or users anymore, so they can't get in trouble for it, but it absolutely still exists. For example, the interest and demographic options that you see in the ads manager, those are years old by the time that you're watching this video.
14:42And they're still there. They're legacy items, but they're not being updated and not really relevant. However, their new Andromeda update is a thousand times more powerful.
14:50So instead of you selecting an audience, Meta's AI figures out the audience for you, not even based on your offer or your business, but based on the individual ad better than you ever could. And it's specifically based on the context that you have in the ad, and we call this contextual targeting. And knowing how this works is kind of the hack, if if you will.
15:10So here's a very simple example. If you have a b to b offer and you want to reach people who own businesses and potentially you think of targeting people that follow Alex Hermosy because he's got a large business audience, you can't target his followers directly in the ads manager like that option doesn't exist. But if you mention business leaders such as Hermozy are doubling down on content in your actual ad, like if you add that those lines in the script, Facebook knows who to show your ad to.
15:34They show the ad to people who have some kind of context for what you just said. The words you say, the graphics you use, the other parts of your video or content are doing the targeting for you, and it's scary good. And this is one of the main reasons why video ads outperform image ads for most businesses, especially with the new update.
15:51Facebook gets far more contextual information from a video. There's more words, there's more signals, more data, who you're speaking to is better defined, and it uses all of that to find the right audience. So the richer your script in your ad, the better Facebook actually matches it to the right people.
16:06And it's also why having a very clear specific script that speaks directly to your target audience isn't just good practice. It's kind of the only way that you can target people with Facebook ads anymore. So use words that your customers use.
16:18For example, one of our clients filmed an ad that called out, if you're a home service based business owner with less than five employees and it worked fine, but we, knowing that contextual targeting is important, asked him to swap out a few of those words for some slang. And so he made a second variation of the ad saying, if you are a one truck chuck, the one truck implying they don't have large operation and the chuck being like a dude.
16:40That that's the slang that the plumbers use, I guess. And his cost per lead on that second ad was like 20% lower.
16:47And so if your ad is vague, if you're talking to general people, Facebook actually has so many people to target that it can't figure out which ones are the likeliest to convert. But if you give them something very specific, if you use the type of language your actual customers are used to hearing, Facebook has way more ammo to be able to do the heavy lifting and get you far cheaper, far higher quality leads.
17:07And this is honestly where most advertisers go wrong. They spend hours building out 50 ad sets with slightly different audiences. Business owner, 20 to thirty, thirty to 50, website owner or not.
17:17That is the wrong place to put the energy. If the audiences you built in Facebook aren't performing, the problem is almost never the manual targeting that you're doing anymore. That is like decade old guidance on Facebook.
17:27It is either the creative, not getting cheap enough leads because you didn't do a good enough job, or the offer not converting a high enough percentage of the leads that you do get. And that's not saying that you should just, like, throw your hands up and let Facebook do whatever you want with your ads because this is still the newer process for Facebook.
17:42As of 2026, you will need to have a lot of manual controls on budget specifically behind the ads, but you're not gonna do that through audience targeting. We'll get into what you should mess with a little bit later, but it does matter way less than the actual creative that you're making.
17:55So we're gonna start there Now learning how to script ads, in my opinion, is one of the highest leverage skills you can learn as an entrepreneur. When Viral Coach won the school games a couple years ago, we went out to meet Sam Ovens, the owner of the school platform, and Alex Hermozzi, who arguably became a billionaire thanks to his social media, how they write all of their content.
18:13And they have thousands of ads running, and of course, Hermozzi is well known for being like the king of organic in the business space. And Alex specifically told us that every single piece of copy, every ad, every email, everything that they put out under his brand comes from him.
18:29His specific words were, if you ever see anything written from acquisition.com or me, I wrote it everything. And so here's a guy worth a billion bucks running a portfolio doing 250,000,000 a year, and he still writes every single thing himself. And that should tell you something about how important this task actually is.
18:46You can't fully outsource your face and your voice. A copywriter or AI, that like, that can help you brainstorm, but they cannot build the trust that converts strangers into clients. And if they could, they just do it themselves.
18:57The truth is only you can do that. And the best people in the space, the best people, they don't take those shortcuts because they know it's more expensive in the long run. And despite saying this exact thing to every client we work with, we still have people who think their version of ChatGPT is smarter than everyone else is, or maybe they just don't take me seriously.
19:13So I will tell you right now, if that is you, you will lose in content. And the competitor who's gonna take your lunch will do so by actually caring about what their ads look like, by scripting them out themselves, by being highly involved in the most important part of the business, which is making money. And that is my anti outsource every brain cell to AI spiel.
19:31You can take it or you can lose. Either way, let's get into the actual scripting. So here's the framework that we recommend for scripting direct response ads, ads where the goal is not just to create general awareness, but actually convert audiences into revenue.
19:43And you can think about this as a flexible guideline. We kinda mix and match depending on the angle, but the core sections are always the same.
19:50You start with the hook. The hook doesn't have to be a direct call out like local service businesses. If you wanna be 10 x more profitable, listen up.
19:57Those work, but they're often not the best because they sound like an ad. They don't sound organic. What works better for us is calling out a behavior instead of a demographic.
20:04So rather than saying business owners as the hook, we usually describe what business owners do. So one of our best performing hooks is, if you're struggling to write, film, edit, and post all of your content by yourself, here's exactly what we do. So we never say business owners, but every business owner who sees that ad immediately thinks that we're talking to them, because we just described in great detail what they do when they're trying to make content.
20:25It's the same as the one truck truck example. It doesn't feel like a commercial on TV because it's very organic, but more like what someone would say in real life. And that's the goal for an organic sounding ad is you want it to be relatable more than you want it to sound super professional to put your best foot forward.
20:39Another one that works really well for us is the biggest names in the space, Alex Hermosy, Grant Cardone, Gary Vee, they don't run the day to day of their business. They spend most of their time in a week in front of a camera. So no direct call out to business owners, but we are describing a behavior that our target audience recognizes.
20:54And we're using contextual targeting. So mentioning all those names, Grant Cardone, Gary Vee, means Facebook shows the ad to people who recognize those names and follow those people, and those people are almost always business owners.
21:06So making sure to call out the ideal audience in some way in the hook of the ad both improves deliverability for Facebook, but also gets the audience's attention because you're speaking their language, gets them to stop scrolling, and give you just permission to watch a few more seconds of your video. The second thing we like to have in an ad is the mechanism, And this is where most people struggle in creating the ad or or finding the right thing, but it's extremely important to get right.
21:28So every ad that you make has to have a clear result, the outcome that you're promising. For us, it's to get all of your content done in a month, or get our million view guarantee. For a fitness offer, it could be drop a dress size in thirty days.
21:40For marketing offer, we'll run your ads with more profit than you have now, for example. But the result that you're promising is not enough. You need the mechanism, which is the how that you actually will deliver on it.
21:52Because anyone can say something, but showing how you're gonna do that, how you're gonna deliver on it creates trust and proves that you have a method of delivering on it. Because across hundreds of companies and thousands of sales calls, the number one reason our prospects coming from cold traffic choose not to buy on the sales call, the single objection worded in a million different ways is that they don't have a clear picture of how the offer is actually gonna work for them.
22:16And the same is probably true for you. You can have a crazy promise, but if it doesn't fit into your prospect's narrative of how it could work for them, it doesn't matter how crazy the promise is because they don't believe it.
22:27So the framework that I used to create this narrative or like this mechanism, if you can call it, is what I call the first, next, then framework. So three steps. First, next, then.
22:35Here's what it looks like for a fitness offer. First, we help you plan simple meals every single week. So you get shopping lists, recipes, you don't have to do any guessing about what you're gonna eat, got it planned out for you.
22:45Next, we plan all of your workouts and coach you through them live on call, so you always know what to do and how to do it, and you have someone keeping you accountable. Then, at the end of every single week, we sit down together, review your progress, customize the program based on how things are going for you. That's it.
22:59So you've walked the prospects through exactly what working with you looks like first, next, then. You don't need all three steps every single time. Sometimes, two steps work.
23:08Sometimes, you can go really deep explaining just one if you're making an ad that's generally supposed to retarget the existing audience that have seen you before, but the goal is always the same. By the end of this section, the prospect should be able to visualize the process and see it working for themselves. So not just a promise that you're making, but them having an understanding of how you're gonna deliver it.
23:26The third thing we try to include is not just showing how we would deliver it for that prospect specifically, but showing that we've already done it for a whole bunch of other people. So generally, we wanna keep this testimonial section tight, like you don't need 50 testimonials in every single ad. That's what your VSL and landing page is for.
23:41But just one or two specific believable results is enough.
23:45Something like, we helped clients like Jack and Lisa each drop three pant sizes in ninety days and have more energy for their family. Specific names, specific outcomes. Save the rest of the really in-depth proof for later in your funnel where it'll do more work or potentially on a sales call where you can take people through a very specific case study that only applies to them and is highly detailed.
24:06But you wanna include at least something in your direct ads so that people believe that you have done this before. And then at the very end of the ad, we wanna have one call to action, one CTA. You don't wanna give people a bunch of different options.
24:18Email me, DM me, call me, whatever. Don't try to be clever with it. Just tell them one thing to do next, click the button.
24:24And specifically, a few that work well for us is click below, and I'll show you how to get started. Another one is, if this sounds even remotely interesting, I'll show you exactly how it works. Just click the button.
24:33So short one instruction, that's it. Make it very easy for them to take the next step and understand what that looks like. And then once you've drafted all of your scripts following that framework, go back through and confirm that each of those four elements are there.
24:46Does it have a good hook to get their attention and to stop them from scrolling? So it have a mechanism where the prospect can not only see that you're gonna deliver something for them, but understand how it would be delivered for them. Show proof that you're able to deliver on this for other people.
25:00And then at the very end, did you tell the prospect what the next step to getting this kind of result for themselves actually is? Now when writing your script, you will also want to write a headline and what's called body copy for the ad at the same time. This is one additional step to advertising on Facebook, but lucky for you, the primary copy and the headline matters a lot less than most people think.
25:19And if you do it right one time, it can be reused on almost all of your ads. So we've been running the same one or two headlines and body copies for like the last $5,000,000 in ad spend.
25:32So we almost never change it. It's a very small consideration in our marketing strategy. And back when we did put serious money into testing different variations of copy, different variations of headlines, there was never really a statistically significant difference in results.
25:44And the reason for that is very simple. Meta is prioritizing the actual asset, the video.
25:49So if your video is strong, the copy around it is mostly just decoration that very few people read. So spend 95% of your effort on the video, the other 5% on the copy is all you need.
25:59The one exception to that is image ads. So without a video doing a lot of the heavy lifting, communicating your offer, contextual targeting, an image will require a lot more and ideally a lot better copy and headline to be able to do most of the selling for you. But across hundreds of client accounts, video assets actually outperform images in almost every case and usually by a significant margin because a great video creative can run millions of dollars before it fatigues, whereas images generally burn out faster.
26:26They require more constant refreshes, and every single platform is prioritizing short form video right now because that's what the consumers, which is their first priority, want to watch. So remember, we have to work with the platform, deliver what the viewers wanna see, which right now is short form video.
26:40So your ads go further when you're working with the platform, not against it. But let's talk about how to write that primary copy. So starting with your competitor research, which you should do in the ads library, as covered earlier, the same research applies here.
26:54So how are your competitors framing the problem that they have? What does their copy look like? What are their headlines saying?
27:00For example, ours right here is our highest converting landing page copy. 1,000,000 views or you don't pay. Find what's working.
27:06Adapt it for your offer. Keep the total copy that you see here relatively short, having multiple different spaces so it's not a massive wall of text that is very scary to read because it's never gonna get read, but rather breaking it up paragraph by paragraph, one sentence at a time, and then really just having your highest converting bits of text here.
27:23And if it takes more than one or two scrolls to read, it's probably way too long. State the problem that your audience is experiencing, and then offer a very clear solution for that.
27:33That's it. So a real example, our copy here, I've been running the same copy for six months at least. Here's why each part works.
27:39So we open with, you know you should be doing social media, but there's a million different platforms, strategies, tricks, and the guys that are spending a lot of month on content have a massive team to support them, which means they're difficult to compete We start here because we know after thousands of sales calls, this is exactly what our prospects are thinking, is social media is intimidating.
27:58There's lot of different things to do, and I don't have a massive budget for it. Almost every business owner who gets on a call with us says some version of this. I know I should be posting.
28:06I just don't know where to start. So we're not telling them something new here. Like, we're just aligning with the perception of the problem that they already have so that they feel understood.
28:15Next, we deliver the solution. But with the right systems, can delegate your content, so you can sit down and film every single week without experience making content or even knowing what good editing looks like or hiring a massive team or spending as much as the big guys. Just sit down and film once a week with our team, millions of followers of experience, and the experts handle the rest.
28:33We hit specific pain points of things that they don't want to experience and let them know that our solution does not require those. Our prospects also generally don't wanna be tied to an agency for the rest of their life. Like, they're business owners.
28:44They're economical. They wanna take things in house. So we also have the angle here that we're not an agency.
28:49Once the systems are in place, you don't have to be reliant on us for a monthly retainer indefinitely. And then we also add a little note here that the implementation is always custom, but the results are guaranteed. So appealing to the idea that, like, no canned approach, no course, no book is gonna make them a millionaire that is super rich and famous on social media, but a customized approach specifically is the only thing that we offer.
29:11And we use these words because this is already what's in the prospect's head. Like, this is what they think they need. After thousands of sales calls of experience, this is what they've told us they want.
29:21We've based our offer around what we know the market wants. And in summary, the entire copy is what we do is different and better than what they've tried before. And then we hit them with, uh, the close here.
29:33Click the link below to learn more. So we have that CTA in the copy as well. Nothing complicated.
29:37Really, you wanna keep this copy simple. You wanna make it easy to read. Don't try to be clever.
29:40Try to be clear with what you're saying. And remember, the video does most of the heavy lifting anyways. So once you make an ad, the next step is to build on it with tons of different angles and variations.
29:52And let's define both of those because you need to understand them to run good tests in your ad account. So an ad angle is fundamentally a different way of positioning your offer, targeting a different desire in the market. So a simple example here is selling watermelons with completely different angles.
30:08Angle one is a family angle. These organic watermelons taste incredible because they're harvested exactly when nature intended them, so your kids will love them.
30:17The kid angle, the family angle. The second angle could be a health angle. Watermelon has been proven to increase hydration, and our organic watermelons have 30% more electrolytes because they aren't harvested until peak ripeness.
30:29So it's the same product, watermelons, that are harvested at the right time, but two different desires. One is to sell a delicious treat to families. The other is to sell a performance health food.
30:38And neither is wrong. They're just speaking to two different segments of the market. And so as you scale your offer, as you spend more and more on ads, you need to develop multiple angles, two, three, five, ten, for multiple reasons.
30:52First, so that no single message speaks directly to everyone. Different people buy the same exact thing for completely different reasons.
30:59And second, every angle that you add extends the life of your offer. You can run millions of dollars through a single funnel with one product if you have a handful of different angles.
31:11Because eventually, the messaging on a single angle will get stale, and you're gonna need a new way of explaining what you do to audiences in order for them to continue buying your product and in order for you to continue marketing to them profitably. So that is an ad angle. An ad variation is a slightly different execution of the same exact angle.
31:29So you're not changing who the core message is for, it's just presenting the same exact message slightly differently. So using the health angle, two variations of that could be watermelon is the most hydrating food on the planet. Our watermelons have 30% more electrolytes than regular watermelons because they're harvested at peak ripeness, giving you superior hydration in every bite, for example.
31:48Variation two could be, if you're dehydrated, drinking more water won't fix it, and most sports drinks are packed with artificial sugars and preservatives. However, our organic watermelons have 30% more electrolytes and fiber, pure natural hydration without the sugar spike.
32:04So it's the same angle going after fitness enthusiasts selling your watermelons. It's the same audience, same core claim, hydration, just a different hook and a different explanation. So having different variations is how you keep a winning angle fresh and continue testing better and better performing ads.
32:21Now when planning your angles and variations, you always wanna establish your winning angles before you start testing small variations of those angles. Because you need to understand whether your core audience, for example, athletes or families, would even pay for hydrating watermelons before you go make a 100 ads talking about all the different ways that watermelons can hydrate them.
32:41If instead the family angle was the only one that worked this whole time for you and the athletes don't care about watermelons, you should only be targeting and making variations for the family. And I only say this because I know from experience, when we first started running our ads, we were convinced that our audience cared about views and brand exposure.
32:58Going viral was our angle. That was our entire angle for all of our ads. But a few $100,000 of testing ads later, we learned that what they actually cared about was having social media content that made their business money in a very short period of time.
33:11And the offer was essentially the same. We're doing social media, but the difference was enough to where one was wildly profitable and the other one almost made us bankrupt. We spent about $200,000 testing dozens of variations of this wrong angle.
33:23And so the lesson for me there is that if an angle doesn't work with your audience, hundreds of variations of it won't work either. So in order of operations, test the angles first, find the ones that generate sales, then build out dozens and dozens of variations of those winning angles. Don't make a 100 of the same type of ad before you even know what works, basically.
33:41Once you have your ads made, getting them published is the very next step. Step.
33:45And while there is a clear path for uploading and making files live that you can find on Google, there's like a full tutorial on it. What there's a lot of disagreement about is across all of these tutorials and agencies and gurus on YouTube that launch ads on the Meta platform is what the campaign and ad set structure actually needs to look like.
34:06And the biggest mistake I see with ad accounts is the complexity of their campaign and ad set structure. So most people equate a busy account with a productive one.
34:17The more campaigns you got, the more ad sets you got, the more active tests you have, the more they feel like they're actually doing. But it's actually the complete opposite. If your account feels difficult to manage, it is probably also hard to measure.
34:28If you're overcomplicating it, it is almost certainly losing you money. One of our clients, for example, runs a direct to consumer business spending over $1,000,000 a month on ads. They have dozens of different SKUs, dozens, multiple services, you know, a decent sized operation to say the least, but they run exactly two campaigns.
34:44When I pulled up their ad account for the first time, I understood everything in, like, thirty seconds. Compare that to the typical account that we walk into, 15 campaigns running simultaneously 10 ad sets each, spending some random amount per day, and it's almost always underperforming. And it's because Facebook's delivery system works better when your account is clean and consolidated.
35:03So when you combine campaigns, when you combine ad sets, Facebook has more data to work with inside each one. It's more organized for Facebook, which means it finds those converting audiences faster for you and at a lower cost. Having fragmentation in your ad account fights that algorithm, and consolidation instead works with it.
35:19So you wanna have everything neat and tidy. It's another instance where just working with the platform, doing what they tell you to, will make you more money. Now next, I wanted to cover how to break down and understand your own standards and KPIs for how well your ads should be performing.
35:34Now, if you aren't having my team take over your ads and if you're managing your own ad spend, emotion is always gonna be your biggest enemy in establishing KPIs and managing them. The only way to protect yourself from bad decisions due to emotions is to know your KPIs where you should be before you even start spending, to have a very clear methodical process for testing and determining when something is working or when it's not.
35:56And you'll hear people online throwing out all kinds of benchmarks. Don't listen to them. They'll say things like your lead cost should be 8 to $10.
36:03Your cost per group join should be under 5. Your your cost per call should be under $300. Those numbers are completely useless.
36:10They don't mean anything unless you have way more context on the specific business and how it converts other traffic. So what actually matters to you from all that noise is what your specific customer acquisition cost is and how that cost relates to the lifetime value of your customers.
36:27Essentially, it's just your cost and your revenue. Very basic. That's it.
36:31And for service based businesses, the general industry benchmark is that your customer acquisition cost should be no more than 30% of your customer's lifetime value.
36:41Meaning, you can acquire a customer for less than a third of what they're worth to you, you should have plenty of room to scale ads. Obviously, there are way too many variables in this to make it a blanket statement. You could have variance in delivery cost and overhead.
36:54This can't be an absolute rule for you, but it's a really good starting point for the math that we're gonna do today. So here's how to work backwards from that benchmark. Let's say your LTV is $5,000.
37:03At 30% CAC, you should be willing to spend up to that 30%, $1,500 to acquire a customer.
37:11That leaves $3,500 for delivery, overhead, and profit.
37:15And say you run a call funnel with those metrics. Let's say when you get someone on a sales call, you close them at a 20% rate and your show rate, so the the rate that people show up to the call for you to close them at 20% is 50%. That means of every 10 live calls that you get on and talk to a customer, you close two customers.
37:34You'd need to book 20 calls because only half of them show up. So two customers at a $1,500 customer acquisition cost, $3,000 total between the two of them, budgeted for about 20 booked calls.
37:46Backing out of that math, that works out to a $150 per booked call. That is your KPI. That is the goal number that you should strive towards if you don't currently have a baseline for what your cost per call profitably should be.
37:57And again, a few things that this example leaves out is for simplicity's sake, you don't include sales commissions, payment processing fees, refund rates, differences in close rates if you have multiple different sales reps selling for you, and you'd want to factor all those into your real numbers. But the basic framework working backwards from LTV, your revenue, to customer acquisition cost, to cost per call to get in front of a potential customer.
38:19You'll understand what range your cost should be in at least. Now once you know your KPIs for calls or whatever end metric you want to track, bookings or leads or conversions, the next job is testing.
38:32And most people do this completely wrong. There's one simple rule, test one variable at a time, hold everything else constant. And there's actually three things that you could be testing at any time and you should be on an ongoing basis, ordered by how quickly you can get meaningful data, one, two, three.
38:48The first one is creative. It is the fastest to test. It is the highest leverage.
38:52Second is the landing page. It's a little bit slower to test, and it needs way more data to be conclusive. Third is the sales process or the offer, which is really the slowest, biggest ship to move.
39:02It's really difficult to test offer. So creatives is where you spend most of your time testing. You can turn on and off ads every single day, adjust the budget, swap the creatives in seconds.
39:10You're essentially running hundreds of creative tests every single day. You're always making small adjustments on the ad side.
39:15You're always trying new angles, very fast feedback loops with the creative. Landing pages are harder because the changes are usually small variations. So you'll try a different headline.
39:24You'll try a different color button. You know, maybe you change the body copy a little bit. Maybe you just swap the VSL.
39:30And the smaller the change, the more data you're gonna need to know if the difference is real or just noise. Like when we split test elements on our landing page, it typically takes several $100,000 of ad spend before we are confident enough to act on it.
39:43Like, that is the amount of traffic we need to have a statistically significant result. And that's not a reason to skip testing your landing page. It's just a reason to be patient and not make decisions too early on it.
39:54And then sales and offer is last, not because it matters less, it actually matters way more, but because it is the hardest to pivot on. Changing your price points, changing your deliverables, your sales process, all affect the KPIs upstream, but these are multi month tests. Because if you need a 10% reduction in customer acquisition cost, you can probably get there by making better creatives over a weekend.
40:15Instantly, new ads, suddenly everything's cheaper. But squeezing that 10% out by replacing your offer and then trying to predict how that affects churn six months later is a much harder problem to solve.
40:28So start with the creatives. Always the fastest path. One of the most common mistakes in testing ads is pulling the plug too early.
40:34You turn on an ad on Monday, put $50 a day behind it, spend $200 by Friday, see no results, and then you shut it off. That is probably not a useful test. And actually, good rule of thumb for testing budget is to budget three to five x your target KPI and spend at least a week testing an ad before making any kind of judgment.
40:52So if your average cost per call is 150, if that's your KPI, you should be willing to spend 450 to $750 regardless whether that is performing or not before you turn it off.
41:02And you'd wanna wait at least a week to let everyone that is on their way to becoming a client either pull the trigger to book a call or actually decide on the sale or decline. Like, you really want to have a waiting period there. And if you have a longer sales cycle like solar sales, you will probably have to wait way longer.
41:18If you have a faster sales cycle like home service, which are usually same day bookings off same day leads, you're gonna have faster testing. But being in the online marketing space, 85% of our prospects book a sales call for the next four days, and then a couple days on top of that to run follow-up after the sales call for up to a week.
41:34So we generally go off seven days. But Facebook's algorithm also needs time to see that data and optimize it.
41:41So shutting things off too early means you just restart that learning phase every single time. And while it's not significant, it absolutely does end up costing you more money than just potentially letting things run and getting more information. And especially if you're on a tight budget, this is exactly why competitive research matters so much.
41:57Like, you if you're modeling a proven creative before you even launch the ad, before you start spending money, if you're starting with higher quality inputs, you're gonna need less spend to be able to validate whether something is working. I also wanted to briefly touch on evaluating performance over a longer period of time.
42:12So, obviously, Facebook isn't a static environment. Ad costs fluctuate based on competition in the markets that you're fighting against, seasonality, and a whole bunch of external events.
42:22Like during Black Friday, costs can significantly spike because a whole bunch of other advertisers enter the platform and just flood the market with ads. So seeing costs go up over a twenty four hour period isn't necessarily any kinda signal to make a change.
42:35It could just be noise. And that's why I like having multiple different look back periods in any kind of judgments that I make when running ads. So I always look at all time performance of an ad.
42:44I always look at the most recent week, and then I look at a three day before making any changes. And I never make any changes off of a single day's worth of data.
42:54Even on an ad that's running at several thousand dollars per day, it's just way too much fluctuation to be reliable. And I'll repeat it for the people in the back.
43:02Before you cut a previously winning ad, you should at least try to lower the budget first. Like, be patient with your ads. Let them properly spend.
43:09We've had ads that have spent over $1,000,000 across several years, like clear, proven winning ads. But when we push the daily spend past a threshold, all of the performance dropped.
43:21Like, we would profitably be running the ad at a thousand dollars a day. And then as soon as we push it up to 2,000, the whole thing breaks. And very rarely is the move cutting the ad, like usually just pulling the budget back works.
43:32It's If performing at a thousand dollars a day, you bring it back down to a thousand dollars a day, give it a couple days, it'll probably start performing again. And this is because Facebook targets a smaller, more concentrated audience with the less ad spend that an ad has. And for most ads, that often means, like a smaller audience, better conversions because you're reaching the most qualified small slice of your audience as opposed to overspending to target this massive pool of audiences that mostly wouldn't have converted from your ad anyway.
43:57And this is why we recommend having a lot of different creatives at small budgets in your ad accounts rather than trying to find one or two monster ads that can carry massive ad spend. Those are very difficult to come across, and it's very difficult to scale them. But the ads that scale to a high budget generally also tend to speak to wide audiences.
44:16But the narrowly targeted ads that can only perform at few dollars, maybe $50 a day, those can be just as profitable, often more so because they're only speaking to a very specific type of buyer. So both of these types of scalable, non scalable ads have a place in a healthy account, and that is even more reason to not kill an ad just because it's not scaling.
44:35Now the biggest mistake I see when people try to scale is scaling before they're ready. And a big reason for that is because people equate ad spend and success, and they're not the same And you could spend a million dollars a month on ads, take home a 100, or you could spend 200,000 a month on ads and take home a 100,000.
44:50It's the same profit, but that second business is five times more successful because it has higher profit margins, more room to grow. And I talk to clients every single week who are they're trying to fix a problem by spending more on ads.
45:02When I look at their ads and they're not running profitable right now, you shouldn't want to spend more on something that's not profitable enough. The goal should always be to become more profitable before increasing the marketing budget.
45:13And this is because when you run a small budget, Facebook takes that limited spend and it directs it to a micro audience. It is highly confident that it'll convert. Small budget, very efficient results.
45:22But as you scale, Facebook has to reach further and further outside of your most interested prospects and start to pull in people who are less interested. They're harder to convert. They're more expensive to reach, and your costs are gonna go up.
45:33Your results will get worse as you scale. That is just the natural economics of scaling past a smaller total addressable market. It's the economic principle of the law of diminishing returns applied to ads.
45:45And so every ad has an optimal spend where each dollar is working at maximum efficiency, where every dollar past that point becomes less and less efficient. And there's no way of knowing exactly where that cliff is until you find it, and I'll demonstrate how you do so.
45:59But your metrics will tell you when you've gone too far. And sometimes when you do go too far, things become unprofitable, pulling back that budget will stabilize results for you. Sometimes to be able to continue scaling an account as a whole, the total budget that you run requires a bunch of new ads or maybe a brand new angle or maybe an offer change altogether that allows you to scale further.
46:18But if you're considering scaling and you aren't a thousand percent satisfied with your profit margins right now, first, you will suffer because the profit margins are gonna get worse. Guaranteed. I know we spend a lot of time just now talking about all of the different hard work that is required to have success in the Meta Ads Manager and finding what resonates with your audience.
46:39But despite all this stuff that actually does work, there is one, like, ten second trick, and I've seen it decrease costs as much as 20% across an entire ad account. Because what most people don't realize is that Facebook stores data on multiple levels.
46:52Stores it on the pixel level, which is your entire account, stores it on the ad manager level, on some campaigns or, uh, ad sets on a performance creative basis, and it stores data on the individual creative level, like as it's shown on your phone when you're scrolling. There's information there.
47:09Every single ad that you launch is assigned a unique ad ID. So it's an identifier for everything about that ad. The creative copy, the where the link points to, and importantly, the engagement that has gotten on social media itself.
47:24What you see on the phone, how many comments, how many likes you have. And once you have an ad that people are responding to, you can take that ad ID and use it across every single ad set that you want, that you have that ad running in. Or when you're relaunching the ad in a different campaign, you can copy and paste that same ID across multiple ad sets.
47:43So you save all of the likes, all of the comments, and the shares. They all pool together instead of splitting across duplicates different assets that always reset the stats.
47:52So instead of having two ads with 5,000 likes each and tons of ad spend that you took to get there, you can have one ad showing 10,000 likes everywhere it runs. And the more social proof you have, the better the performance and the lower cost you'll get on that ad. And that's because Facebook prioritizes user experience.
48:09So if they know your ad has better engagement than a competitor's, they're gonna give that ad an edge in the auction process over all the other ads. And there are some ads that are like two years old on our accounts. And by no means are they up to our creative standards today, but they still perform simply because the post itself, like the actual video is now viral.
48:29And it has hundreds of comments, thousands, if not tens of thousands of likes. And the only thing to be aware of with this strategy is once you commit to an existing post, nothing can change. So you can't change the copy, you can't change the headline, the thumbnail.
48:42Meaning, if you put a crazy guarantee in the post for your company and then you stop offering that guarantee, you can't just update the text a few months later. Like, you'd have to stop running that ad and nuke that ad ID altogether. So just take that into consideration when planning what you will say or offer in your ads.
48:59Sometimes, we take that into consideration being a little bit more vague on your offer or your deliverables will be cheaper just because you can scale that ad for multiple more years. So an example of this is we're considering offering a new deliverable to our service.
49:13But because it is new, because it is untested, because it's not proven, because we're not sure if two years from now we're still gonna offer it, actually, don't include it in all of my ads, just some that we use to test, because I don't want all of my ads to potentially be completely useless two years down the road. I'd rather find individual winners and continue allowing them to scale, potentially have them be a little bit more generic at the start.
49:35Now I'm not gonna walk through the technical steps here on how to, like, copy that ad ID since the Facebook interface could change tomorrow and make it completely useless, but a quick Google search or asking my team to do it if you're working with my team should save you a good bit of money. Here's a quick video on how not to get banned on Facebook.
49:50It is a lot simpler than most people make it out to be. It is very scary though, so it's important I wanted to address it. The golden rule here is to do exactly what Facebook says every single time.
49:59There's no loopholes. There's no gray areas. There's no room for interpretation in what Facebook says.
50:05It's black and white. And honestly, it's a very good thing because it makes the rules easy to follow. There's also a cheat sheet that I'll link down below this video, but ultimately, it's on you to know any of the specific regulations for your niche, especially if you're in something that's highly regulated by independent third parties like if you're in health care, finance, or insurance, or anything like that.
50:21Do your own due diligence. This is not me telling you what to do if you're in any of those highly regulated industries. So first, you wanna check your landing page.
50:29Make sure all of your links work. If you have a broken link somewhere directly from your ad, you could get your entire account banned. And Facebook will crawl your site, and they're gonna find that broken link before you do, and then you could get in trouble for it.
50:41So always check before you launch. Over the years, we've had almost a 100 clients launch ads without telling us, without checking first, and they end up with a broken link somewhere in the funnel, and they get a warning from Facebook or, like, I think a couple even got shut down. And it's just one inconsiderate, incredibly risky, and it's wasting ad spend because you didn't spend a simple two extra minutes running through your funnel.
51:01Please always check the links before going live. Next, don't be misleading in your headline. Facebook crawls every page that you link to, and so they'll see stupid stuff if you do it.
51:11But the headlines generally are the ones that get flagged the most. So in that headline, the very top of the page, the very big bold text that you have promising on whatever you're hoping to deliver on, you should not be promising things that you can't deliver on. So if you're in the franchise space, for example, if you sell people, you know, businesses in a box, something like make 6 figures a month with no experience in your headline will get you shut down.
51:34Don't do that. And if you're concerned, you can move any specific result that you have, any kind of income claims, any kind of guarantee language you have. You can move those into your video sales letter, which isn't as scrutinized or further down on the page to where it's not the headline unless you're absolutely sure that headline is compliant.
51:51Next, your ad and your landing page need to match. So if your ad is about email marketing, your landing page better be about email marketing. And people running an ad for one thing and then landing people somewhere completely different is like an immediate ban from Facebook, and there's no way to rectify it.
52:05Also, no instant redirects to other domains. So if one someone clicks your ad, they get redirected to another website seconds later, Facebook considers that deceptive, you'll get banned.
52:15Now in the actual ad creative, some things that you shouldn't do, no before and after photos. So this is largely applies to just the fitness, weight loss, plastic surgery space, side by side photos.
52:26Like, even with clothes on, you're gonna get flagged. What you could do instead is put those as organic content because for some reason, Meta doesn't mind that as organic content at all. And then you can run a campaign to get new followers, but the images that you use to get new followers can be generic images.
52:39And then you get new followers with those generic images, and then your entire organic page has before and after photos. That's fine. That's a quick workaround there.
52:47No fake functionality on your actual ads, so don't put a fake play button on a static image. Don't flash images or artificially cut off your video so that people, like, you hack engagement and they try to rewatch it.
52:59Like Facebook knows. It'll shut you down for it. Don't do that.
53:01Obviously, no shocking, violent graphic content. No weapons.
53:05No tobacco. No explosive. Stay away from income claims entirely in the ad.
53:09Like, don't say make 6 figures. Don't say close 5 figure clients every day. Don't imply a specific earning results.
53:18Facebook flags those every single time, and you're just gonna have a hard time. Like, you might not get banned for that, but you're gonna get your ads blocked, and it's gonna unnecessarily slow down your process. And if you follow this course and practice scripting, you're not gonna need those income claims anyways.
53:30You're gonna be able to capture attention way better with organic signing content. Next, don't assume personal attributes. So Facebook is actually cracking down really hard on this in the last few years, especially in the health and fitness and finance space.
53:40So don't use words like you in your hook. For example, you shouldn't say things like if you are over 200 or if your credit score is under 500. Anything that calls someone out based on how they look, what they earn, uh, their financial situation, all of that is off limits.
53:56Instead, what you can talk about is how we help service based business owners scale their business with social media, implying that if you are a service based business owner, we can help you. Or you can say, my clients on average drop a pant size in thirty days, or our clients increase their credit score by 200 points after ninety days.
54:16So, again, targeting the same exact people, but just doing it so compliantly. Also, no swearing in your ads. Even if it is part of your brand voice, it is gonna get limited by Facebook.
54:26You're just gonna waste money advertising ads that aren't getting distributed properly. Spell everything correctly. If you have ads, any kind of intentional spelling to be able to bait comments in your ad specifically is gonna get flagged.
54:37For some reason, that's fine on organic. On ads, they crack down on it for you. And then on the account and admin side, when you're setting up your account, you wanna fill out your business page completely.
54:46So the business name, location, about section, use a real profile picture. Any blank page that you try to run ads with or a grainy photo will get your ad account disabled before it even gets started. It's really crazy how picky they are about that.
54:58Next, you probably should post organic content regularly on your page. An empty business page is also a red flag for Facebook and usually just takes a lot longer to fix problems with.
55:09You should absolutely also get your page verified. Do that first few dollars a month to be able to have just a little bit more consideration from Facebook. Absolutely a no brainer.
55:19You should also set up two factor authentication. Speed around here. You should also use one personal profile.
55:24If you have multiple profiles, it makes Facebook think that you're not a real person or a real business. So just focus to one and running ads out of one.
55:32Set up two payment methods when you're setting up payment methods and get them on autopay. So if one payment declines, especially early on when you're scaling an account, it is one of the fastest ways to actually get an account shut down is to have payments start failing because Facebook thinks there's you're stealing from them.
55:46So use two credit cards, set them up on auto pay, and then I even called my banks before I started to spend. Like, physically called Chase Bank and American Express and said, if you decline this card, I will stop doing business with you. And it completely eliminated the problem.
56:00It sounds like a crazy thing to do, but when you call and telling them that, like, the entire account that I have with Chase Bank, the entire account that I have with American Express hinges on them not declining Facebook charges, they won't decline Facebook charges. Next, you wanna season your ad account. So when you open a brand new one, you'll have a daily spending cap.
56:16Often, it's like 50 to $100 a day. You can't bypass this, but it really limits your ability to scale. So what you can do is spend that limit every single day on approved ads to build trust with Facebook, and then gradually raise that threshold.
56:29We wasted a whole bunch of time early on trying to scale our ads, but we couldn't because we were limited in daily budget. So if you plan on running ads next month or maybe next quarter, at least open your account and get it set up and start running a low daily budget so you can season your account, build trust with Facebook, have recurring charges go through on your card every single day, and show Facebook that you are here for the long haul.
56:54Next, you should also add a terms and service and privacy policy to your website, both linked at the very bottom, the footer of your funnel. This is required by Facebook. Plenty of free boilerplate versions.
57:03Just Google it. And with those, you should be on your way to being compliant with Facebook.
57:08By the way, if you made it through the whole thing, woah. It's a crazy amount of stuff that you made it through. Congratulations.
57:15But there's even more stuff that you haven't yet made it through because you're not watching this in the actual school group that we got. It's down in the description below. It's free.
57:24Get this that you just watched, which you don't need anymore because you've already seen it, but a whole bunch of other stuff that you haven't seen yet and attachments and docs to be able to go through this stuff, uh, resources, uh, software that'll literally write your scripts for you so that you don't have to do that when trying to run ads as well.
57:45Yeah. It's it's down in the description. It's free.
57:49So there you go. Um, I'm out again one more time.
The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

One million dollars in ad spend last month. Multiple millions in revenue. That's the opening claim, and unlike most paid-ads educators, this one has the client account data to back it up — which means what follows is operator knowledge, not theory.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

19:49model

First, Next, Then

  1. First — what happens in step one of your process
  2. Next — the middle step and accountability layer
  3. Then — the outcome and ongoing support

Three-step mechanism framework for direct-response ads. Makes the delivery process concrete and visualizable for a cold prospect who has never worked with you.

Steal forAny service offer where cold traffic needs to see how delivery works before they book
29:52concept

Angle vs. Variation

Angle = a fundamentally different market desire (family vs. health vs. performance). Variation = a different execution of the same angle (different hook, same core claim). Test angles first; build variation libraries only on proven angles.

Steal forPlanning a creative calendar or scaling past initial ad spend
37:03model

KPI Reverse Math

  1. LTV × 30% = max customer acquisition cost
  2. CAC ÷ close rate ÷ show rate = cost per booked call
  3. Cost per call × 3-5x = minimum spend before judgment

Works backwards from customer lifetime value to a rational cost-per-call ceiling, then sets the minimum test budget before you're allowed to cut an ad.

Steal forSetting pre-launch KPIs for any call-funnel business
02:51model

Meta's 3 Priorities

  1. 1. User experience
  2. 2. Meta revenue generation
  3. 3. Advertiser success

Meta's hierarchy of who the platform is built to serve. Advertisers are third. Understanding this explains why ads that look like content beat ads that look like ads — the platform rewards what users want to watch.

Steal forFraming any paid social strategy or client education
CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

VERBAL ASK
04:55product
Click down below — it's on Skool, it's the Viral Coach masterclass, it's free

Delivered as a mid-video interruption at 4:51 with a self-aware comedic tone ('I don't even know why I need to keep listing things'). Repeated as a bookend at 57:15. Clean one-CTA execution consistent with the framework he teaches in the same video.

MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
Storyboard

Visual structure at a glance.

cold open — ad account dashboard
hookcold open — ad account dashboard00:00
3 priorities of Facebook slide
framework3 priorities of Facebook slide02:51
Facebook Ads Library research demo
valueFacebook Ads Library research demo10:51
ad scripting section
valuead scripting section17:43
ad mock-up phone frame
valuead mock-up phone frame25:09
real ad copy on screen
valuereal ad copy on screen27:08
levels of data Facebook gathers
valuelevels of data Facebook gathers46:40
best practices checklist slide
ctabest practices checklist slide51:04
closing CTA
ctaclosing CTA57:32
Frame Gallery

Visual moments.

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