A subscription app · B2C · Marcus Burke client
Give ads that deliver differently, like mostly Facebook feed, their own ad set
What they did
In their words
Marcus Burke - How to Build a $2M/Month App (Copy Me)
… of their budget on Facebook feed. Yet, if they're all mixed in the same ad set, Meta is not really looking at this dimension. They're just looking at what kind of gives me the best cost per target and what's engaging. If you compile all your ads in one ad set, then Meta is going to not diversify for you. They're just looking and they're always concentrating spend. They're going to pick the ad they think is best, which in their case is this one.
And they're going to spend 80% of the budget on that. And then there's going to be long tail, but there's going to be very little spend on these other ones. So simply by identifying these, I mean, they're below target. they have a high spend of share on Facebook feed. You basically pull them out, give them their own ad set and basically give them room to breathe, have some budget allocated to it. And you don't need to select your placements or you don't need to select a targeting. You know, these ads are delivering on a different placement. So you can have broad targeting across all placements, all age groups.
And you know, that's just where they belong based on how people are engaging with this, what the format looks like. That's kind of one of the most important charts, I think. And that's always what I look at. I mean, this is now just placement level, but then again, you'd also want to cross check, well, what's the audience behind this? So by spending 90% of budget on Facebook feed, did I actually end up buying an older audience, which is my …
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More from this episode
- Say 'app' or show a demo so the App Store isn't a surpriseMost winning app ads do this; installs suffer otherwise
- Remake one winning ad ~400 times with new hooks and use casesWell over $1M spent on the concept
- Run short videos with a wall of text in the audience's own pain wordsOne of the main working formats; no numbers
- Feed 10-20 Reddit threads to Claude to write ads in your audience's wordsHis standard process; no numbers
- Make ad variants with AI: create an image first, then turn it into videoUsed for clients; not compared with creator videos
- Mix app demo clips into everyday videos, like a chore list for ADHD
- Run ads that look like normal posts; let a web page do the selling
- Send Meta ad clicks to your blog instead of the App StoreClaims to be one of the first to scale this way; no numbers
- Compare cost per trial with trial-to-paid rate for each age groupAges 25-34 cost the most; older users looked under-served
- Split ads into groups by format and message, each with its own budget
- On a small budget, put all ads in one group and pick winners weekly
- Have every ad team member interview one user a weekTaught the team most of how to write ad copy; no numbers
- Post on LinkedIn 2-3 times a week
- Fix the store page, onboarding and paywall alongside paid ads
Tags: meta, account-structure, placements, outlier-ads, budget