GTM Sauce

BPM · B2C · dating app for sporty singles

Test ad tracking with $5, start at $50/day, add ad sets once costs hold

Stable costs; some ads ran profitably for months

Workedpaid-socialanalytics-attribution

What they did

1) Technical check: put ~$5 on a throwaway campaign and verify installs, trials and subscriptions fire to the right networks. 2) Start at ~$50/day (or $25 or less). 3) Wait until spend is 'clean': CPI / cost per trial / cost per subscription stable and profitable for 1-3 weeks (he sanity-checked numbers with industry friends). 4) Stack additional ad sets, each ~$50/day. 5) Change anything on a network at most once a week so the algorithm stabilizes; some ads have run 4-5 months. Expect a 'honeymoon' of great early CPIs from Meta before real costs appear.

What happened

Stable costs and ads running for months; paid ads profitable (spend withheld).
Stage
post-launch scaling

In their words

$140K MRR Niche Dating App in Just 6 Months

Play from 34:34

… that installs campaign were literally the worst we could have done. but yeah it was fun to discover it hey but you did well with just an insult campaign i love that story yeah yeah definitely all right so yeah i don't remember what authority sorry about that uh yeah so that strategy um the strategy on page you wait so basically how i see it is the the the tech the technical setup is definitely a nightmare and it's still a nightmare today

34:34

sometimes we like three days ago we had a problem with an event and we had to change it etc etc so it's it's it's it is a nightmare and it's gonna stay a nightmare so you have to be sure that everything works correctly and you have to check like put five euros on a random five dollars on a random campaign and make sure that every event falls back to the right networks that installs work correctly, that your trials or your subscriptions work correctly.

35:04

Once that's done, you can start small. So if you want to run paid ads, I would advise you to start at like $50 a day if you can afford that because it's like already a lot of money at the end of the month. But if you can start at like $50, otherwise you can do $25 or less. Wait until the spend is clean. What do I mean by clean? That means like if you're running installs campaign, wait until it stabilizes, wait until you are happy with the results,

… cost per installs or down the line, cost per trials, cost per subscriptions, wait until it's clean. And then you can start stacking ad sets. So I don't know if everyone's familiar with the notion of ad sets, but it's basically a group of ads that you can create on any network. and one line equals $50 a day or the amounts that you set yourself to. And you start doing this. And the key, key really opinion, not opinion, advice on this is to only,

36:09

the key advice is stability. Change stuff on any network as little as you can. In my opinion, of course, I've got friends that are gonna disagree with me, but if you can change it once a week, the network is gonna like it he's going to have a change once a week, he's going to be able to adapt, he's going to be able to stabilize afterwards, and he's going to reward in a way this stability with having stable costs. And that's how we can run the same ads for like months and months. I know we don't have like a lot

36:44

of spend on paid UA compared to the big ones, but still we have some ads that have been running for like four months maybe five months because we are stable with our media buying with our ua strategy so that was uh the final advice i love it gabe hey what did what did you go what was clean for you like before you started stacking it's a good question honestly um i i didn't have something

37:15

something specific in mind in a clean when I started. But I knew some people from the industry and I was like, all right, here is my numbers. What do you think of them? And they were like, for a start and for your spend, these are good. And once I saw that I had those numbers for one week, then two weeks, then three weeks, I was like, all right, this is nice. I'm getting some revenue. I'm generating some revenue from those numbers.

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Tags: meta, budget, ad-set-stacking, stability, event-tracking