TEA 245: Meta Is Still Having Bad Days (How To Optimize Campaigns When It’s Not Your Fault)

Meta Bad Days

0:00meta always has days where performance across the board for a majority of businesses is bad so we built a tool that tells you when meta had a bad day and in this episode i'm going to teach you how to optimize a campaign when meta has a bad day my name's dylan i'm one of the hosts here at the ecommerce alley podcast and this is an audio only solo episode it's just me josh isn't here today i'm not sure if you guys noticed but last week on thursday josh dropped a solo episode

0:32audio only and this is kind of something that we're starting to do just as our thank you for audio listeners we just wanted to give you some things some some content that you can't get anywhere else it's exclusive to audio just as our thank you for being audio listeners and i just wanted to make a request before we get into this episode if you like this episode if you've been a long time listener maybe you just found us recently we're trying to become the number one ecommerce podcast in the world and a review would help us a ton to get to that so if you if you'd be

1:03willing to leave us a review it would mean the world so the the team over at breezeway which is a software that we are co-founders in built the bad day detector and it's based on reddit and it's funny because we kept seeing posts on reddit all the time where people would ask hey are other people experiencing issues is meta having a bad day and it was pretty much every other day and in coaching we coach a lot of e-commerce brands and there were times where i would coach i coach on tuesdays and

1:36wednesdays and on tuesday i would coach some brands and i'd be like this is really strange like these brands all had high cpas on these two days and it was like the first time the first brand that i coach was like this is weird maybe something's wrong i'd go look at their website look at their stuff and be like well i don't know there's it doesn't seem like there's anything wrong here but yes your cpas were high but they came back down that's really strange and then the next brand i would coach same issue and then by the third brand when all three brands had the same issue

2:08i would start to be like okay so this was like a widespread issue so then when i went into coaching on wednesday i kind of went in expecting people to be like what happened on tuesday and wednesday last week and i would be able to tell them at that point yeah meta just had some issues but now we have the bad day detector where we can know the day after because it looks at all the aggregate data like i used to do in coaching but it looks at it live time and makes the decisions for us so the team at breezeway built the bad day detector based on aggregate data inside of breezeway it basically it uses

2:43statistical significance and a bunch of other stuff i'm not really qualified to talk about in order to tell you if meta actually had a statistically statistically significant bad day or not now you may have a bad day that doesn't get reported on the bad day detector but that's because the bad day detector is looking at over 50 e-commerce businesses inside of breezeway spending over 500 a day to make sure that a bad day actually was a bad day we don't want to flag every single day that has slightly worse cpas as a bad day we want it to actually be a genuine report of a bad day

Bad Day Detector

3:19now here's here's the problem a lot of time business owners kill campaigns or or even winning ads winning ad sets because performance tamed i'd see this all the time in coaching where i would be looking at a campaign that had been doing so well and the brand owner killed it i was like why did you kill this and they're like well all of a sudden it just kind of fell off so i thought maybe you know insert reason here whatever that is create a fatigued audience whatever and i would typically

3:53ask that person so what what are the odds that all of a sudden you you had a winning campaign a winning ad set a winning ad winning creative winning message winning style winning something and it just fell off a cliff because these are not like slow increases of cpa it's not like you go from a 20 cpa to a 23 the next day to a 25 to a 27 to a 30 to a 35 over a week it's like you go from a 20 to a 35 a day sometimes even like 20 to 70 it's crazy and the the hard part like i explained earlier

4:30is before the bad day detector you really didn't know it really came down to for me i was able to kind of figure it out by process of elimination or just by exposure of seeing multiple brand accounts in a week where i would be able to start to tell okay i think meta might be having some issues today but as a solo owner running your own ads you don't probably have the insights that i do when i'm looking at multiple brand accounts to say okay everyone had a bad day this day so it makes sense

5:04so now before we dive into this episode i want to like i said give you the three things that we do to optimize a campaign when meta has a bad day but i wanted to let you guys know next tuesday may 26th we are doing state of meta ads q2 and breezeway breezeway is going to come with new features and data and the e-commerce alley is going to come with what's working on meta right now whether you're already using breezeway maybe you've considered using breezeway you've just heard

5:36of breezeway or you just like to attend events for some reason uh we'd love to have you attend this event uh like i said we're going to share data that breezeway has been curating for meta ads as well as what we're currently seeing work on meta we're also going to be going over new features that have been released to breezeway in the past few months and then most importantly we're going to show how we use breezeway to optimize and make data-driven decisions for e-commerce brands and now if you attend this event we are going to be giving everyone on the call a limited three-week breezeway

6:10trial so if you go to the breezeway website right now you'll only be able to get 10 days so you'll get 11 extra days of trying breezeway just as our thank you for attending the link is below in the show notes to rsvp and add it to your calendar and just just as a note this will not be recorded so you do have to be live to get it so i'm going to go over three things that we do to optimize campaigns when meta is having a bad day one our exact step-by-step flow for optimizing when meta has a bad day two how to

6:42read the bad day detector and three how to not lose profits when meta has a bad day so let's start with

Reading Detector Results

6:48reading the bad day detector it's a pretty simple tool it has some hidden nuances that are a little hard to visualize that i want to talk through here's what i would recommend go to breezeway.co slash bad day detector links in the description to to go take a look at it while i'm while i'm kind of talking through it here so we work with over 200 e-commerce brands and we we truly rely now on the bad day detector to tell them how to make good decisions as i as i explained with with coaching

7:18in the past i kind of had to make my own inferences in the past but now i have the bad day detector to make good decisions and what i've learned after a few years of doing this bad days impact accounts on different days this is this is this is a key so for instance there actually was a bad day reported on may 11th but i've actually noticed that if a bad day was reported on may 11th it could be plus or minus one to two days per brand which makes this really tricky because each each ad account is a

7:50little bit different and you may see a bad day on the 12th but the bad day detector reports one on the 11th so the bad day detector is really great for understanding if there is a bad day in the vicinity of time you're looking at plus or minus one or two days from the reported day now a lot of times the bad days are reported on the same days and i was actually talking to cliff about this a few weeks ago he said something that was really interesting where a lot of times a bad day is actually created by meta underspending one day and then the next day wanting to spend the rest of

8:26your budget so overspending but then not having the audience to hit when it overspends so it goes to a worse audience essentially which then means you're getting poor quality traffic and if meta does that for multiple brands at a time which it typically does that's what causes a bad day back in january and february we had red dots going up into like the the negative six range which is like really really really bad which i think a lot of people here probably felt that and that is what actually caused us to want to make the bad day detector i think we we finished it around

8:59mid-march maybe end of march so that's what made us want to do it because january and february was just so rough you can go and look and say oh turns out that bad week two weeks that i had in january and february were not my fault it was actually meta so now i want to talk about how we actually optimize a campaign when meta has a bad day so the first thing we do pretty much every morning is open the bad day detector because that sets our expectation for what to expect when we then

9:30open the ads manager a lot of times and and this is what we've we've seen in the past you you're used to like a cpa of 20 bucks like you're just living at 20 and then overnight it turns to 35 which understandably most business owners reaction at that point is to cut back on spend or turn things off or or try to you know do whatever's in their control to fix it but unfortunately this can make a bad day even worse and i saw this so much before we had the bad day detector where something would

10:02happen people would would kind of freak out and make like rash decisions that then extended a one or two day bad day into like a week plus like it can really really hurt your account now before the bad day detector existed you were left looking at your ads manager and wondering did meta start targeting a worse audience did my creative fatigue did my offer die is there now like a technical issue on my landing page or my website but now that we have the bad day detector we don't have to assume it was us

10:36anymore and we don't have to go into panic mode we can say oh meta had a bad day and then the way we optimize the campaign is waited out unfortunately the only thing you can do is wait it out because you don't have control it's not like you can send an email to meta and say hey don't have bad days anymore it just doesn't work so you don't have control over meta having a bad day or not now what i am going to talk about here in just a second is what you do have control over how to not lose profits

11:08when meta is having a bad day but here's here's a big caveat to the bad day detector this is not a cop-out we tell our clients that yes meta may be having a bad day but it doesn't mean you should just throw your hands in the air and say oh well it might be hard to not do that but here's the thing a lot of times you might think you have a bad day but then you go to the bad day detector and there were no bad days in the vicinity and now you're like well maybe the bad day detector is wrong no you can't use the bad day detector as a cop-out for not looking deeper go and look at your cost per click

11:45your add to cart your conversion rate your aov figure out did something actually happen did something change did i turn something off did i increase my budget did i whatever because we always want to assume that the problem is us we don't want to blame meta because unfortunately blaming meta will get you nowhere the only thing that it can do if you look at the bad day detector is give you confidence or clarity in potentially a bad day but we always want to assume it's our fault because if you blame meta

12:19for poor results ultimately your profits will just go down the drain which leads me to my last

Protecting Profits

12:25point if meta is having a bad day you can't expect a refund they will probably say advertising is a perfect science and skirt responsibility we love you meta but come on but this is this is really what breezeway exists for we want to expose data analytics and information that meta will never tell you so if you want to learn a little bit more about what breezeway is exposing what data what analytics and everything i would encourage you to attend our state of meta ads q2 next tuesday may 26th and see how we

13:00bring this data to life how we use breezeway to make better decisions and what we're seeing with meta right now but here's the thing you're responsible for your own profits and despite what meta does to your account you don't have control over that there are ways that you can regain and protect your profits after meta has a bad day i'm going to give you two one is keep an eye on your 30-day ad spend percentage now breezeway has this built-in in the ceo dashboard and the metrics tab where it

13:31automatically tracks your 30-day ad spend percentage shows it to you visually on a graph it also shows you in the ceo dashboard we recommend keeping your ad spend percentage of revenue between 20 to 25 percent so your revenue 20 of your revenue is how much you should be spending on ads and we recommend a range because if you say 20 i want to be at 20 well you can't keep it exactly at 20 it will move up and down so pick a range that makes sense for your business most businesses are 20 to 25 but depending on your

14:01cost of goods and your profit margin and all of that you might be able to go a little bit higher now here's the thing a bad day you look at your ads manager and you're like oh my gosh my cpa in the last seven days is just ridiculously high which is true but a bad day only raises your ad spend percentage by like a percentage or two your 30-day ad spend percentage will only move by like one or two percent so if you've been keeping your ad spend percentage in check up to this point it won't hurt you that bad it might make your ads look bad for a week but it's not going to actually hurt

14:36your profit now if you're not keeping your ad spend percentage in check within that target range maybe 20 to 25 bad day or not this this really doesn't have to apply with a bad day but it might make it feel a lot worse because one or two percent more over a range you already are outside of can really hurt we recommend decreasing your spend to where it would comfortably be within that range despite meta having a bad day or not this is something that is in your control that will protect your profits and you need to take control of your ad spend percentage because that is the thing that

15:11you you actually have control over and that's the thing that's going to actually protect your profit and like i said a bad day detector is not going to take your your ad spend percentage from 20 to 40 it's not going to do it it's only a few days now if you go and turn things off and you do some crazy things in your ad account when meta has a bad day that can hurt your ad spend percentage a whole lot more but if your ad spend percentage is already in check a bad day is not going to completely destroy

15:42your profits the second thing that you should do is just fight for better results just because meta is having a bad day doesn't mean you should stop your advertising cadence that you know you should be maintaining you should still launch ads weekly you should still send emails weekly you have to do the things that are in your control we have an episode of the podcast called three things to do when your business hits a slow season it's episode 240 i'll link that in the notes below i would recommend listening to that because it's a 20 30 minute deep dive on even more things that you should do and stay

16:18focused on when the business slows down and we actually talk about the bad day detector in there where sometimes a slow season is just caused by the season sometimes slowness is caused by bad day on meta sometimes it's caused by whatever but anytime that your business slows down or feels like it's not moving whether it's meta or not it's the same things that you have to do that episode goes way more in depth on that if you want to listen to that so to recap the bad day detector is a tool not a cop-out

16:50use it to make sure you're making the right decision don't use it to cast blame on meta for poor results secondly the bad day detector is very valuable because making quick knee-jerk reactions when it was meta and not you can turn a two-day bad day streak into a seven plus day bad day streak and lastly you need to keep your focus put your focus on the things that you actually have control over in your business because focusing on things you can't control like a few bad days on meta will cost

17:21you a lot more in the long run don't forget about the state of meta ads q2 with breezeway on may 26 there's a link below to rsvp for that we'll see in the next episode you you you you you