Jacob

For most brands Black Friday is seriously overhyped and so much unnecessary time is spent on preparation

All you really need is:

- Banner on website (optional countdown timer)

- Add BFCM offer to hero image on PDP

- Launch a bunch of offer statics

- Take best evergreen video ads and put BFCM banner on them

- Plan a few more emails over that period

All in all takes like 2 or 3 days max and even the above stuff is optional

Only exceptions here were a serious amount of time and planning needs to go into it are brands that rely heavily on gifting

Most brand would be better off just focusing on their evergreen efforts and launching new products etc

Stopped adding statics and BOF ads to my scaling campaigns after a convo with @scalesurfer_

We are now spending more than ever right now and CPA’s dropping

My new rule:

Scaling campaigns are exclusively for ads with higher first click ROAS than what’s reported by platform or triple attribution and higher than account average NVP

All statics and BOF ads stay in ABO testing campaign and scaled there according to triple attribution as well as needing to meet 20% higher ROAS targets or better

Before e-commerce I was an engineer specialising in automation systems

I would design and install automation systems in hospitals for surgery theatres, pharmaceutical labs and storage facilities, large government office buildings etc

Controlling everything like the temperature systems, humidity, ventilation, pressure, vital equipment, alarm systems, emergency shutdowns

And something I learned during that time is that the more people wanted sophisticated systems with complex automations, the client satisfaction and usability of the system declined

It looked great at handover but as time went on the clients would forget how certain things worked, a fault on one piece of equipment would start a cascade that ended up in large parts of their building being un-usable with no way of manually over-riding things, they’d need to employ people full time to look after the system of have us called out frequently for maintenance

This time of my life led me to be someone that much that much prefers things when they are stupidly simple

And it was the same with a lot of our engineers. We would be building these ridiculously complex system for clients but in our own homes, we wouldn’t even have a thermostat for our heating. Just a simple on or off button

This obviously has spilled over to e-commerce

I’ve seen lots of guides on how to automate parts of the business and when I look into it I immediate just know it’s gonna be a nightmare to actual use and maintain

I think back to open claw and how much time people were spending there to setup what in my mind could have been a lot simpler. Plus there was always bugs and you need to keep reconnecting things etc

It’s only recently that I think the tech is there with ecommerce to make simple automation systems and I’ve started fully embracing it

Like with our customer service. The only reason we are at at automation rate of over 90% is because it’s super simple to do it now, and the system itself has few decencies, points of failure or maintenance (shout Commslayer)

Same with bots and automations there

I hated openclaw, it just filled me with frustration

But the bots now like Grok Bot are super simple and make automating parts of the business super simple and maintenance free

But even with these bots, don’t think you need to do anything crazy to get good output

There seems to be a tendency for people to think that the more steps, the more context and the more information they give these things the better. This is not true

Always start with the absolute bare necessities of what you need for the system to work. Run it for a while and see if the output is good or if you do actually need to add another step or add more context somewhere etc

Do not just blindly put parts in without first testing if the system can work without that part

I think if I showed people exactly how we’ve automated our customer service or our static ads etc they would be incredibly underwhelmed

And that is the point you want to reach with any automated system, that it is underwhelmingly simple. Like a 5 year old could have came up with it

Complexity is the enemy in automation

Start with the end goal and work backwards only adding things that are absolutely needed to achieve that

No “ah that would be cool to add” or “that’s super clever let’s do that”

If you really want to ramp things up you can add negative feedback loops into the equation (which basically means the system will self improve and correct itself)

For any nerds go do some research on PID loops

This is only added after the system functions though

I've seen a lot of people argue about incremental attribution vs 7DC1DEV attribution on Meta

Here's my take and what i've found after experimenting a lot over the past 4-5 months

- Any form of cost controlled campaigns will spend more if using IA and still hit roughly the same targets

- If you have two identical ad sets in a lowest cost CBO but one is using IA attribution and the other not, the one with IA attribution will spend more but have worse performance

- In platform reported CPA tends to line up much closer to first click attribution on triple whale with ads using IA

So how I'm using it and why:

For any new ads being tested we use IA. Reason is simple. We use TROAS in our testing campaign and new ads tend to always spend with this while using IA

And because no matter what style of ad you introduce to a testing campaign, new visitor % will always be pretty darn low. So having the IA, knowing that it lines up better with first click attribution makes sense here in terms of Meta optimising towards what you want. All the new ads pretty much retarget pretty heavily so if you know that IA is gonna optimise more towards being buying off first click it means you won't get as many false signals in testing

For regular scaling campaigns we run on lowest cost so stick with 7DC1DEV knowing that IA performs worse for us on lowest cost bidding

Graveyard campaign w also run on IA attribution for the same reasons as the testing campaign

Would encourage people to test this out it's been working great for us

Trybe is cool platform, I like it, I use it, we make money with it

But it’s a very small percent of our overall spend

We have to run all our Trybe ads in a separate campaign to our regular stuff as the Trybe stuff just does not get spend competing with our internal team

And yes, we train them very well, give higher than normal commissions and have quite a lot of volume coming through Trybe

And this is the thing, if you’re using Trybe and it’s been what your relying on to scale your brand, your internal creative team is shit

I’m sorry but it’s true

I would be eternally embarrassed if random creators were able to come in and outspend our teams ads considering our team does this all day every day and knows everything about our products and audience

It’s like being a so called expert at MMA and getting knocked out by a random dude on the street

So yeah, if Tybe has been what’s scaled you, you need to take a long hard look at your own creative team and be ashamed