Foreign. We are back with another myth that we're gonna debunk, and that is the set it and forget it myth, which is, what do your media buyers even do all day? Aren't you just adjusting cost controls up and down, uploading creative. How hard is that? ASC Etc. Etc. Why this myth exists, right, is cost controls reduce the need for daily adjustment and daily budget adjustments. And so it appears automated
from the outside looking in. So success often looks like we're just leaning into the machine learning system, which we are. But what are they even doing? Which also kind of addresses the whole role of a media buyer today and what that looks like. So we're going to be jumping in, Taylor and I. This is a fun conversation about kinship and our media buyers and our philosophy, but also just around cost controls in general. Is it really that easy? Is there a science to this?
What are we understanding? How are we affecting the ad account from outside that account and what that actually means? So without further ado, let's jump into today's episode. Welcome back to another episode of the Bottom Line. We're continuing our cost control myth series, and today we're diving into a spicy one. I would say a myth out there. Spicy ice. You read. You ready to tackle this one, Taylor? Come on. I don't think they're ready.
They're not ready, though. No one's ready but us, and that's good. All right, so here's what's coming up in sales conversations. I think people think cost control media buying is basically set it and forget it. Like, hey, Taylor, Cody, all you do is kind of upload some creative, maybe adjust the cost cap here and there and let Facebook do its thing. I've even someone just come to me cold. So, like, what do your media buyers even do all day? Kind of basically
suggesting what I just said. So before we dive in, what's your gut reaction when you hear that? Taylor, you're welcome. Like the last one? No. Kind of. Yeah. No, it's just where does the time go? Right. That's the question that you're trying to get at there. And I would say what I always say to our media buyers here, right. Is the less adjustments you make in the ad account, the better you are at your job at the end of the day. And so that's just not
where the time should be spent. And if you have a media buyer internally or even media buyer at an agency, and you're going to the edit history and you see a bunch of adjustments to budgets and. And things like that, like you got a bad media buyer on your hands. That's our immediate red flag. And so whenever I go into our accounts and look at that, it's an opportunity for me to give feedback to our media buyers.
If there are too many adjustments happening, there shouldn't be. If there's adjustments, it means they're missing the mark. And that's an immediate red flag. And so that would be my immediate response to that is that's a red flag right off the jump. If you have that happening currently in your ad account and that needs to change, that's not where they should be spending their time. I feel like this myth actually comes from a good place. Like, right.
Like, because we, I mean we, we talk so much about what you just said, which is like the over managing of campaigns, about letting the machine learning system of Facebook do its thing, but people swing it too far the other way. They think, oh, so you just don't do anything like. And I think we need to. That's what this episode is all about. Is b. Basically breaking
down why that's not the case. Which is what you're just talking about, which is we're solving for things outside of the ad account to affect the ad account, essentially. Right. Like you're, we have a whole holistic view which we're going to break down of the entire business, which is just an another thing to bring up, which is, you know, a media buyer internally at a brand, how bored are they? Right. Like we, I mean we've heard of people that have leave agencies that go
internally at a brand. They end up basically freelancing on the side because they're bored. Like as they're used to managing six to eight accounts and now they're managing one and they're realizing like, well, what else am I doing? So they start freelancing. I'll digress from that. But I mean, maybe let's talk about first what people don't see, which is just maybe the massive iceberg under the surface around content management, especially for like the content pipelines that we source.
Maybe can, can we talk about what's actually happening, like for our media buyers in terms of like the hours spent, like even if we just talk about categories like ad account builds, creative analysis, like basically walk people through what's actually happening. Not like an hour by hour basis, but maybe the buckets of time allocation. This is what it goes into. Right. It's not. A majority of their time is spent towards strategy. Right. Of course we have comms.
We pride ourselves on the comms. That we have with our clients, but outside of that, and we tried to actually create boundaries around it so that we have a lot of time to go towards strategic thought work to ultimately deliver quality on the deliverables here. And so a majority of the time is spent towards one, forecasting, two, like what Cody already said, creative analysis
and then three landing pages and offers. Right. And I think just starting from, you know, top to bottom there forecasting, but majority of media buyers, again at agencies or internal buyers, you know, get their target from a cfo. Right. And they don't have a lot of ownership around that target in the ad account that they're working with in which we used to do that a long
time ago. But it's a very flawed system. Right. We want to be partnering with you guys in setting that target and what that target means for your business from a top line and overall profitability standpoint. If we have that, you know, overall profitability target from your brand and then we can forecast it all out, we can reverse engineer what your blended new customer roas target is. And then we do this on a day to day basis what that blended new customer roas target means for transitioning
and translating that into an in ad account target. Once we have that, that's step one, that's first and foremost and we're running linear regression analysis to identify what that target should be and a lot of other data to determine that as well. I mean that could be a whole separate episode, I would say, in determining trans, like how to set that new customer as target and then translating that into an in ad account target and then fact checking
that consistently is step one for sure. And then that goes into setting cost caps against that. And then it's solving for spend which is the next piece of this. And you can go into this as well on your end all of the media job, media buyer's job is how do we solve for spend against this target now and then constantly fact checking is this the right target based on all the other levers within your forecast? Right. Repeat rates, your cost centers,
all of the above. Yeah. It's just the, the position today needs to be so much more diverse than maybe it used to be or maybe just back in the day it just wasn't as complex.
But I just think about years ago, even at Kaylo or I don't know, just the Facebook heyday, the, the role has expanded so much to where if you aren't, if the media buyer internally had a brand, if you're an operator listening to this and you have an internal media buying team or just one, if he isn't connected to your creative team, to your landing page or like agency, like whatever, it's team. I use that loosely. Whether it's internal or external, your landing pages, your offers,
your maybe you're even your copywriter. Like, and then also what you just brought up of like you're getting a target from a CFO if you aren't integrated with the finance side of the business. Yeah. So, and, and I think this is a good transition. Right. Which is like something so critical and how we transition as an agency is to this whole piece around AMER versus in platform cpa. I mean, how often that, that does come up to switch people's mindset from making decisions on in platform cpa.
Right. Like they, a lot of media buyers get trapped in this, so they're just looking at in platform metrics making decisions in a vacuum. Right. But when we're looking at decision making, like obviously we're looking at what, five different data points minimum before we're making any more changes. So I guess like walk the audience through that process and this is going to get more
granular into more of like the forecasting side of the business. But it's, it, it goes into, I mean, this is how our media buyers are making decisions. They're not making decisions off of, you know, in the scenario where you're seeing weak in platform CPAs, but strong am, for example, I think the best way. To chat through this, at least on my end, would be go through an example of what this would look like. So we had a health and wellness brand
subscription. I think the repeat rate within the first repeat order rate within the first six months was like 150, 200%. So a really good LTV, really strong. And they came in and communicated, hey, we want to be at a 4 MER for new customer ROAs. That's a really, that's a really high new customer ROAs. And again, before we did our forecasting process, anything like that, they just kind of voiced that to us. So our media buyers
are going in and making suggestions. They're doing the analysis, they're building the forecast and they're showing a four new customer blended roas to the client because that's what they requested and what that means for their forecast. When we built the forecasted rn, we suggested, hey, we think you should actually be going after a 1.5 new customer with the LTV that you have and all the other cost centers the way that you have it set up. And so we're doing that thought work.
And why is that? Because on our end you're paying us to understand auction dynamics within Meta. Right. As well. They exist within a category, right? Health and wellness, really strong ltv. They exist within this category where all of their competitors the, they're probably going after a 1.5 new customer OS and there's not going to be any customers left over in that auction on Meta if we're going after a four more aggressive. Yeah. There's not going to be anybody left
over to buy your products at that point. It doesn't matter how good your creative is, it doesn't matter how good your offer is. There's not going to be any customers left over at that point. You're completely shooting yourself
in the foot. So it's questions like that, right. Like we can go try our best and our darndest and, and achieving a 4 for you for whatever reason that that's the case probably because someone that's your friend in a different brand category altogether that doesn't have a similar LTV and all their levers that make up their business are different than yours said I'm hitting this so you should go hit it. But that's, that's not how, how this all, all this
works. So on our end we're understanding the auction dynamics at play and what am you are with a very heavily educated, a very analytical approach makes sense for your business to level up to a top line and overall profitability that would lead to success for you. And at that point we have our target and then again we have that target. We translate, we translate that to an ad account target on Meta and then set the cost caps accordingly. And now we go solve for
spend by hey, creative, creative, creative. And that's where we have, you know, a ton of pipelines built out. Every single additional creative asset that you can launch is another opportunity to spend against the cost cap that levels up to our overall profitability. And then you think about offers and landing pages as well to unlock that spend as well. Yeah. So I'm a, I'm an operator listening to this. Great. You guys, you, you guys are dialed in on the numbers.
We're forecasting our business together. I feel like I'm pretty savvy with the numbers. We got an Amer. The account is not hitting this. Amr, what is our decision making process when these happen? These things happen. Right? Because it's not a. You, you know, you might not nail it the first time.
There could be other factors that affect this and this is where I Think my point earlier, which is just like what's happening outside of the ad account is there's a lot of things that are not within our control, including the brand itself, the product retention, all these different things that affect that account. So that's kind of a, I guess you could say, context for the
conversation, right? Like there's, there's meta is incredibly important and it dictates a lot, but it's not everything into even what you just said, the auction dynamics. So in that scenario we're not hitting our, our Amyr. That's translating to an in ad account cpa. It's not leveling up. What's our decision making process go through, even our process of like when not to make it a change, how often we're making changes like some of those frameworks. Well, that's the
dream question. I think that question gets at the whole point of this podcast, like that's what you're paying us to do right there. Like that we're not hitting the targets that we need to that level up to again, what everyone cares about our top line revenue goals and our overall profitability goals that go in line with that. You're hiring our media buyers to solve that. How do we continue to grow your top line at your overall profitability target through meta. And so if
that's currently not happening, something's wrong. It's a signal, right? Obviously. And what does that signal indicative of? The first thing that I would say we would do here is creative. Right? And that's what you get when you onboard with kinship. What we're doing is we're going to max out your creative opportunities and the amount that you're getting in the ad account each and every single month. Creative is the number one way to unlock spend at your profitability
target. For sure. If that doesn't work, hey, let's look at your offer. Let's look at CRO here on your website and the offers that we're put, that we're putting in front of our people, in front of our target audience. Let's test different offers here. Is that still not working at that point? I really look at, you know, do we have the right, is this Amy our target? Is this possible? Like what are your competitors hitting? Do they have a lower Amy or target where we just don't have any customers
available to us? Like these are all the questions that we're running through and looking to answer one step at a time in order to solve this problem. And then, okay, if you don't have the retention to Support that blended new customer as. Okay, we need to work on our retention here to get these numbers up so we can afford a lower AME or lower new customer
as. And so these are all the different ways that we're coming alongside you and constantly thinking about to better support you guys within Meta. It all comes back to meta and that's what you're paying us to do. But it's not set it and forget it. That's the furthest thing from the truth. We're just doing a lot else from a strategic standpoint to make meta work. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the biggest takeaway of the episode. And it's just thinking beyond the platform. Need to. You need to.
I don't know how anybody operates within Meta without doing this. Yeah, just blind. I can't really speak to that because obviously this is like we're working in a silo of our media buyers and kinship. But I do know that brands that have internal media buyers, this would be a big episode to listen to if they're not included on all the other things that are happening outside of the platform to make decisions. Um, and it's also. It's. If you have an internal media buyer that's You're.
This is where it's. You're kind of bringing up the first initial point, which is what you said at the beginning, which is you're making too many changes. Because if this is your entire job and you're trying to really improve the performance and you're bored potentially, because I'm looking at adjusting cost controls. Um, there's only so many things that I'm adjusting. Budgets, I guess, potentially. I'm creative testing. I'm just thinking of all the other things that people do.
I'm just touching that account all the time. And you're hitting spot on. Right. And if you don't give them he or she visibility into all these other things that we're talking about and give them ownership over it, they're going to be inclined to do that. Right. Because why? Because it makes them feel valuable. It makes them feel like they're doing
something. But it's the worst thing that they're sabotaging that ad account by constantly resetting optimization and not leaning into the machine learning system of Facebook by trying to outsmart it and doing too much. And that's always going to lead to detrimental impact on the business within Meta. There is a problem today with too much fake UGC saturation. Consumers are looking for authentic reviews and content. And this is a way that you can stand out in your crowded
market with authentic influencer content. So Cody here with an ad read for get Seril. So there's an explosion of DTC brands across categories. You gotta be able to stick out. We here at Kinship actually use Seril for influencer discovery. But Seril is not just a discovery tool but you can a way that you can search for brand aligned influencers but reach out directly. You can manage them all in place. You can track performance all within one platform.
So brands like Avi Legends, Tab Chocolate are using them to get hundreds of creators talking about them on socials and you can too. And in addition to that, all of our clients here at Kinship that are doing seating are using that platform as well. So you can start your free 7 day trial with Seril to get authentic UGC. Go check them
out. Let's go into the science of cost controls though. I mean I think there's a, I think that'd be interesting just tangential topic of this of which is just like some of the rules we have around when we're how often and how quickly and this kind of goes into like the major point of just like how, how infrequently you're making changes is probably the, the best way to do it. Like knowing when to not touch it.
Some of those, some of those rules like hey let's, let's break it down for like number one when we get new creative in where is that going? Like what campaigns are we uploading content to and some of the rules that we have. And then number two like making changes on a cost cap because we're not adjusting budgets hardly ever. Right. Because of those inflated budgets what you talked about last time.
So and this is where like that myth comes into play is like aren't you just adjusting cost caps up and down and uploading creative. But let's go into some of those sciences of when you upload creative like knowing where to put it. There is a science to that for sure. Yeah. Now we're getting into a little bit of the structure of things. But yeah, going back to the beginning, the first thing I say to our media buyers is ideally I don't see you make one cost cap adjustment
the entire month. What does that mean? It means you have the perfect cost gap within the ad account that levels up to our blended new customer Roas Target. If you can get that, that's a huge win. It's a huge one. And it's that that translation between blended new customer to in ad account it's based off we do a lot of analysis to make those two connect, but we, we need to be monitoring that. Right. And it takes like a month or month and a half, two months
to really get that squared away. So there will be initial adjustments to begin with, but once you have that connection dialed in, you shouldn't be making adjustments to cost controls. And then yeah, on budgets wise, the only time we do any sort because we do know inflated budgets like Cody just mentioned, if you spend more than 50% of the budget on any given day, we would hike up the budgets again because you'll always want it
to be. There's probably a little bit more on the bone at that point to increase budgets. But that's not very frequently or very. Often we get new creative in, right. So like we're, we're constantly getting new creative obviously from our creative pipelines or even get it internally from the other brands with like founder videos or static imagery. Like we get new creative. Where is that going in the science and know how and which campaigns to touch, which campaigns not to touch.
So when it comes to cost controls, adjustments and budgets obviously is not a ton of time going towards that. There is some cost gaps, adjustments, manual entry, post sales. That could probably be another episode altogether as well. I mean that goes into, I mean just to jump on, on that goes into like the forecasting, understanding seasonality offers and
understanding what's happening outside of the ad account. Yes, there's things to talk about on that front post sale you do need to insert yourself, make adjustments. But okay, that a majority of the time actually in the ad account. Obviously we've talked about things outside of the ad account. You know, creative forecast, landing pages, offers to solve for spend in the ad account it's doing builds, right. Launching creative. And so that's where
the work comes in for sure. Within the ad account itself, outside of like these more strategic things that the media buyers are doing. And when it comes to structuring it again, the competitive advantage that kinship brings is creative pipelines. We're mass, you know, producing content to supplement our paid media efforts. Within meta and the structuring of it, right. There's a lot of, I think I feel like it's just a buzz, trendy scaling campaigns, testing campaigns.
When you have cost caps, every campaign is a testing campaign that has the opportunity to become a scaling campaign. And when it becomes a scaling campaign, don't freaking touch that thing. Right? The more again we've talked about this in this episode time and time again at this point, the more you touch it the worse that ad account is going to be performing. So when you find something that works, when you find that vein, let it run its course and don't touch that thing. Don't lose the momentum.
Let that momo build up and let it rip. So structuring wise. Yes. You know, ASC campaigns, you have 150 pieces of creative per ASC campaign. You want to have those as diversified as possible. I've seen some accounts try to split up up campaigns and ad sets by this is for ugc. This is for statics, this is for so on and so forth. Bad. Don't do that. The more diverse it is, the better performance will be. That's a meta best practice 100%. And again, let's just
say you have one product to you, one offer. Let's say we start off with 300 pieces of creative. We would just launch that into two ASC campaigns at the same at the cost control. That levels up to our AMR. Right. Let it run. Let's say in two weeks from now we get, you know, 300 more pieces of creative. Right. Campaign one. What will always happen within a cost control setting is, you know, that one campaign out of all
your campaigns will get a majority of the spend. And then within that campaign, you know, 5 to 10 of the creatives out of the 150 will get a majority to spend. And that again, that is not a bug. That is not a bug. Feature baby. Episode one. You, you, that's what you want it to do. You want meta to allocate your best next dollar spent behind the campaign and by behind the creative within
that campaign, that's going to get you the best return on your money. And a majority of the time that comes down to even if there's just one piece of creative, that's great. That's the next best hour spent. All good. So two campaigns, 150 pieces of creative, each of them one offer, one product, so on and so forth. The next week, two weeks later, we get 300 pieces more creative. So only the one out of the two campaigns are spending any money. The second
campaign isn't spending anything. We would replenish 150 of those ads in second, the second campaign, remove them and put in 150 of the new ads into that second campaign. So the first campaign, we're not touching it. That's working. Don't freaking touch that thing. Don't get rid of any content in it. Don't add any new content. Let that thing run its course. Let it scale. Second campaign 150 ads are being removed, 150 new ads are being put in,
and then we're launching a third campaign with 150 new ads. So basically we're leaving. What's working? We're not touching that. And then we're. And then the, you know, content. That's not spending. When we get new content, we're, we're, we're switching it out and replenishing it and then continue to scale in that way. Is there anything to be said over. Okay, let's say those two campaigns. Again, another hypothetical example.
It's not a hundred percent, one campaign, zero percent spend on the next campaign, but it's more of like a 70, 30, 60, 40. I know this is like nuance here. I would launch the third and fourth campaign at that point. Yeah, I want to replenish it again. We're talking, we're getting to the margins. But I, but I like this, though. Like, no, these are natural questions that people come up with. So, yeah, so I would just launch a third and fourth campaign at that
point. And, you know, the natural next question there is, wasn't this just an endless cycle, so on and so forth? No, in the beginning, I would say, you know, you're more prone to maybe get, you know, spend to one to two campaigns. Once you get to eight ASC campaigns, there's not going to be more than four campaigns getting expense. You at least always have four, four times 150 ads. Right. You're looking at 600 available ad placements at that point. I think that math was
accurate. Yeah, it was. But. Yeah, so you'll always have at least like 600 placements ready to be refreshed, you know, in any given week. And hey, if you're pumping 600 ads per week, good for you. Uh, that, that, that's an awesome, that's an awesome problem to, to solve for at that point. But then come talk to us if you, if you're there. Um, yeah, no, that's good. So natural. I mean, another, this is another hypothetical. We're maxing out the eight campaigns. So those two products use four
of them. Like, one product's getting all the spend with those four campaigns. The next offer, or sku, is getting little to no spend. What are we doing with that product, sku, besides talking to the brand, I'm sure. Yeah, no, I mean, I think there's a real argument at that point. Right. If we, assuming, you know, we've tried to position this offer, we try to position this product, we've maxed out our Opportunities to try to get delivery against the target cost control and
the blended new customer roas. We've done the work there. Assuming that's the case, there's a real argument to be made of, hey there, we have a lot of extra room here to go. Scale product one, what's working? You know, you know what's working, right? And there's a lot to say for that option because we're only using half of the capacity of the ad account to really push this thing forward and we're
finding a lot of success for it. Now you open up another half of the ad account, could that mean double the amount of scale? I don't know if I would go that far. But you're definitely opening up for a lot more success than you've been experiencing currently with getting zero spend out on this second offer. Second product sku. And that's where it's just a conversation with the brand. Right. It's like, do you want to just make Meta?
This is going to be the acquisition that we have. This is like your first time, especially for the way that we set up Meta to be a new customer acquisition tool. This is basically your first time customer product that people are buying. So do we want to just double down on this or do you want to continue to bang our heads against the wall to try to offer the second product or second skew? Well, and that's like coming back kind of the main thing of this episode.
Like what are we even doing on our end? Right? Yeah. This type of thought work as well, like what products use are actually going to level up within Meta to your overall top line and profitability goals. And take into consideration, okay, when someone buys this product SKU versus that product sku, how does that impact ltv? How does that impact your retention rates? How does it impact cost delivery overall for your business? All these things we're constantly monitoring to ensure that it levels
up to success. Let's. Let's end on another you're welcome comment with what we do with new creative to offset any favoritism. You're welcome. It's my favorite line. It's very arrogant, but it has the best intentions. When we get new creative. This has just come from, you know, a lot of clients. You know,
put a lot of work and so does our team. Put a lot. Puts a lot of work into sourcing new creative and so it can be disheartening at times when we get that creative into the ad account, everyone's super excited and oh, it gets no spend and that's where Cody says another you're welcome moment that we would say you're welcome. You know, sunk cost fallacy. Don't dig a deeper hole. You know, you don't want to go burn money and that's the beauty of cost controls.
Right. But that said, there is, you know, a justified way to go about this that doesn't go put it in a testing campaign on highest volume and you go burn your money. You don't need to go to that extreme. But there is something to be said of, hey, you have this cost control that levels up to your target new customer roas and within your existing
campaigns, you hold it at that clip. But when you introduce new creative to offset, you know, some of the favoritism that the algorithm shows to existing creative through social proof and through existing data. On those campaigns and it's a, it's a rightful statement. I mean, creative works better with more data, right? For sure.
100%, yes. I mean it's not, we're, it sounds like we're dogging on it, but it is a right thought process of like, well, all this creative has pre existing data social proof of what you're saying. Yes. Which is exactly why we've set up this rule. Yes, yes. To offset that, what we're doing to expand on Cody saying the rule is we will elevate cost controls temporarily on
new creative being introduced into the ad account. So again, when we have 150 new assets, for example, and we're creating a new campaign, let's just say, hey, we have a $50 cost control that levels up to our target, we will raise the cost controls on the new creative 10 to 20%. So let's call it 15. You're looking at $57.5 cost control instead of a 50. And we'd probably do it for about a week.
And again, what is that for? To offset the social proof that's had on these existing campaigns, the spend that has aggreg data behind those campaigns and those ads. So we're offsetting that. I wouldn't go further than that. I wouldn't go longer than a week. I think that's more than enough time. Ideally you're getting 50 purchases on that campaign right. In an ASC so it gets an optimization. All of that, once it's done, we would lower the cost controls to that Even clip
at 50 where all things are equal. And then if it's not getting spend at that 57.5 over the course of the week, don't give in. A sunk cost fallacy. That is enough to say, hey, you know, the next best dollar spent is behind these existing creatives and these existing campaigns that we have. Well, let's wrap it up. What do your media buyers even do all day? They set it and forget it. Set it and forget it, baby. Well, I think we addressed that.
I mean it's, it's shift from reactive to proactive management that's, you know, appears automated from an outside perspective. So I think that's why the, the myth exists. Even with, even when ASC was first introduced, it was just like, why do I need even a media buying agency? They made it so easy for me. So some of these things that even outside of cost controls that ASC has made it easy to launch a campaign.
But I think it's significantly undervaluing what especially what we just talked about compared to even just a normal media buyer is doing so, spending 80% of our time outside of that accounts with strategic work to affect what we're doing inside. So would you have any final thoughts on it besides. You're welcome. You're welcome. No, Yeah, I mean,
just tldr. I think it's. Your immediate buyer should have ownership of what that target should be and constantly fact checking that target because it should, it shouldn't always be the same. Right, because all the other levers of your business are constantly changing. And so your media buyer needs to have visibility into that daily, weekly, monthly to be able to determine, okay, should this actually be our target? It's our target today, but it shouldn't be our target next
month. Your retention metrics go up. Okay, there's opportunity to lower this AMER now to lower this in ad account rows, they should have ownership of that target and be monitoring if that target should be what it is today, tomorrow, and then again two solve for spend. Once that target's locked, how are we solving for spend? Creative offers, landing pages, so on and so forth. I mean, we didn't even talk about other channels. Visibility into other channels, which is
part of the. Another huge thing. But this has gone long enough. Not that you guys don't like listening to us, because I know you do, all you faithful subscribers out there. But until next time, we don't know what the next myth will be, but we'll be back with another one, I'm sure. Thanks for listening, everybody. You're welcome.