TEA 253: We Analyzed 70,000 Meta Ads and Found the Perfect Launch Volume (W/ Cliff Brown @ Breezeway)

0:00SPEAKER_00Welcome to the e commerce alley podcast. I'm really excited. This is a special episode because I actually have with us the co-founder of Breezeway, Cliff Brown. And if you're not familiar with Breezeway, you need to go check out Breezeway.co. We co-founded this tool with Cliff Brown, who's here. He came up from Atlanta and we've been spending the last two days together. Cliff, I'm so excited to be here because we're going to talk about ads. We're going to geek out a little bit. We'll follow some of the rabbit trails as we go. But man, thanks for

0:30SPEAKER_00being here. This is your first ever podcast. It is. Yep. First time I've podcasted with anybody. Oh, really? Like first overall. Yeah. Yeah. I'm honored. I'm honored. Dude, I'm so excited that you're here because we have, we've been working together for years. Cliff actually started, you I mean, you started out as a client of ours with one of your e-commerce businesses.

0:52SPEAKER_01Yep.

0:53SPEAKER_00But you've had a background in development and software for how many years?

0:57SPEAKER_01Oh, for my entire career. My my background is uh well, my college degrees are in electrical engineering, but that's really applied math. And that's what I've done, you know, most of my career. So probability and statistics and all that kind of stuff. I'm able to apply to e-commerce.

1:13SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. I love it. So like I think this is what's been so good about our partnership in the last. I mean, you started as a client and we've been building Brazeway for I think three years-ish right now. I think that what is what works so well with us is because you are so analytical and technical, and I'm like very feely. Uh, maybe that's a good way to put it. I'm like, hey, I I see all this data or I see all these things happening, and I feel like this is the threshold here, this is what works, this is what doesn't. And then you get to come in and be like, oh, this is what the data tells us, this is

1:44SPEAKER_00what embedding is on meta and how Andromeda works. And like you give us all this like deep dive, and I think that's why we've been so good, like as like a t a team.

1:51SPEAKER_01Aaron Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. You know, honestly, a lot of times I kind of confirm what you intuitively knew, but other times, you know, we find, well, we can optimize things a little bit. You know, if we change things slightly, we can get a little bit better performance.

2:02SPEAKER_00Aaron Well, or we find out that my feelings were wrong, and I'm like, ooh, I gotta change the data actually is contradicting my feelings, and I gotta change this a little bit. Well, that happens to me too. Yeah, yeah. I I think that's what's great. Like we're always for for us in like Breezeway, everything is data over emotion. Right. And I I even say that in our coaching all the time, where I'm like, hey, marketing is a mathematical equation, not emotional decision. Maybe that's one of the things that really got us a vibe and right out of the gates, because I would always say that and you are the

2:31SPEAKER_01That resonated with me, yeah. That that really did. Yeah. But you know, I mean, truthfully, you gotta trust your intuition initially, and then the math comes along later. Does can I can I confirm what I believe is going on? And and that's how you apply the math. Yeah. But you gotta know, you gotta know what to test, right? If you just randomly look for stuff, then you'll find a bunch of false positives and that'll lead you down some blind alleys. So, you know, I think this is what's going on, and then we'll we'll try and prove that mathematically.

2:57SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, if anyone is not aware of what Breezeway is and and who Cliff is, well, this is Cliff. And you're gonna get to know Cliff over the next however the heck long we end up talking on this podcast because Breezeway is a it's a tool we built, honestly, out of it start it's been out of frustration, honestly. I mean, we built it out of like first it started as attribution. We're like meta's attribution is really, really bad. And so we started building Breezeway, and this is like three, I don't know, it's over it was almost three years it should go that we started. It's been a long time. It really has. So we started first

3:28SPEAKER_00it was attribution, and then we it has evolved to the point where like now we can take people's data of like we called the breeze brain in the software. It's like where it takes all of their, their, you know, their their AOV, their gross profit margins, all their metrics. It tells them their breake-even CPA, their break-even ROAS, what good targets would be. And then inside the ads manager, it even breaks down like statistical probability or you we have called a breeze score. And there's so much more. We have ad launchers, it cuts your time by like two or three X from like launching in Meta and it avoids

3:58SPEAKER_00all the dumb, annoying things that happen when you like duplicate an ad and it turns all these settings back on and AI settings. So we have been on this quest to connect. It's called the Breezeway. It connects data with confidence. And if you're unfamiliar with Breezeway, that's Breezeway in a nutshell. And so we have, I mean, how many, how many, many dollars are being managed on Breezeway right now? Do you have a ballpark? Oh gosh.

4:23SPEAKER_01I mean, it's in the tens of millions, certainly. I that's that's a statistic I should know off the top of my head, and I don't know.

4:30SPEAKER_00I guess we're growing every day. I mean, new people are growing, coming in and like so the cool thing is what what what I wanted to bring Cliff on to talk about was I want to answer this question because we've been asked this so many times. And that question is how many meta-ads should I launch? And I asked Cliff to deep dive into the numbers of this and come prepared with what he's observing from a what he's observing from like a mathematical standpoint, not just like a feely standpoint. Because I was

5:01SPEAKER_00talking with a client yesterday about this, and she's spending $2,500 a day, maybe something like that on ads. She's like, I think that I need more volume. And I was like, Well, yeah, you're launching six to seven ads per week. We need way more, we are gonna need more volume here of ads. But the question is always like, how many should I launch if I'm doing spending $50 or $100 a day or $5,000 or $2,500 to $50,000 a day? And so this is the quest that I'm on to answer with you, Cliff, today. And I'm excited to see what we come up with.

5:32SPEAKER_00So I guess the uh the question I have for you is do you observe trends in the number of ads required by spend level?

5:42SPEAKER_01Oh yeah, absolutely. The I mean the answer the short answer is you probably need more ads than you think. The I guess the problem that people run into, particularly if they don't have a marketing or sales background, is they hope they'll create one great ad and a and a world will beat their path to the door. But there's a reason why you don't see ads run for decades at a time, right? They they they lose their novelty and people stop watching them change channels or whatever, and they'll do the same thing in social media. So yeah, you need to continually be

6:13SPEAKER_01coming up continually coming up with novel things. The other problem is that an ad, you know, can tip typically only absorb so much spend, right? And so once uh meta has played out who it can show it to, it's gonna need something else to try and show. But it's not just the number of ads, of course, too, you know, it's also the quality of the ads. So you gotta worry about them both.

6:34SPEAKER_00Now you something that we've talked about in the past, and you you did this, you did this, you showed me a graph once. And I I don't know if I've told you, I've taken this and I include this in our onboarding for all new clients every week. Uh-huh. The shelf life of an ad. Okay. I when you talked about it, it made so much sense to me. And we've incorporated it into our onboarding. It's a I took the screenshot you sent me of the chart, and you had analyzed something like 69,000 ads in Breezeway. So it was 69,000 and some change, almost 70,000 ads that you analyzed. And you shared the shelf

7:05SPEAKER_00life of like how many got spend, how many ads only got one day of spend, two days of spend, three days, four days, all the way up to like 366 plus days or whatever. Or a lot of ads get zero. Zero spend. Yeah. Oh yeah. There that's zero, and then one day and two. And then it was basically how long does an ad get spent before Metadrist stops spending any dollars or even pennies on it, just zeroes out. And it the it was, I think it was eight days.

7:32SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's not very long for a typical ad, right? Now, what you're hoping for is to find ads that will run for weeks or months even. But most of your ads are going to die pretty quickly, and that's probably an expectation that most people don't have when they first start advertising. So what we've found, and we've kind of confirmed this with other people that have published similar statistics, is you know, only roughly 5% of your ads are going to get a significant amount of your spend. So 5% of your ads might get 80%

8:03SPEAKER_01of your spend or 85%. It varies a little bit from company to company. But the point is that the people that are successful at this have to create a lot of ads. They have to create a lot of good ads, too. It's just not volume. And that's how you win at this game. You know, it's uh there's other things you can do to tune, you know, in terms of how you configure your campaigns and your ad sets. And of course, everything else has to be set up right. But at the end of the day, you got to be really good at creating this stream of ads to test.

8:32SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's that that that was always the reason we include it, by the way, is that because it was eight, it's what we have is eight days of average shelf life spent, and we use it to just reiterate to our new clients why we teach a weekly cadence of launching. Like you need to be injecting new ads. And what I see sometimes is people th at ads as like this optional thing, and they're like, well, I'll just launch ads when I find time, and nobody ever finds time to make ads because

9:02SPEAKER_00a lot of people don't want to make ads. And so they launch when they feel like it. And it's like every two or three weeks or once a month. And I'm like, you have to treat this as a non-negotiable, the same way you wouldn't just be like, ah, you know what, we'll ship out orders like whenever we get to it. It's like, you ship out orders because it's the lifeblood of your business. And we try to tell people like the lifeblood of your acquisition and growth is meta-ads, and you have to do it every week. And so your grow your your data allows me to back that up and tell them like, and it's not just me saying this, the team at Breezeway analyzed 70,000 ads, and here's what

9:33SPEAKER_00they see eight days.

9:34SPEAKER_01Well, you come from a sales and marketing background, so it seems obvious to you, but you know, somebody like me that comes from a technical background or somebody that's starting a business usually doesn't appreciate the fact that they're gonna have to spend a significant amount of their resources on sales and marketing to be successful. And usually it's gonna be, you know, half of whatever it is, half your time, half your spend, you know, half your money or more to make that successful. And people, you know, just starting out don't want to believe that. They want to think, you know, well, I've got such a great product that, you know, people will discover it and it'll go viral. But that almost never happens. You've got

10:05SPEAKER_01to have that sales and marketing component. And if you're not willing to commit to that, then you're probably not gonna be successful in in meta advertising.

10:13SPEAKER_00Yeah, and we definitely see that in like all the the businesses and clients who we work with that are the most successful, they're just they're they're so meticulous and specific about the fact that they cannot drop the ball. And I have clients who like, they're like, I'm going on vacation. Do I launch ads this week on vacation? I like I'm not gonna be able to film anything on the week. I'm like, hey, just get ahead, or it's okay if you skip one week or two weeks a year. Like because they're just so, but they've grown as a result of that. Now, I think this is also important. The reason I want to have this conversation about how many do I need to add is because I also believe

10:44SPEAKER_00that some people they get comfortable with their cadence of how many ads that they launch. So some people, step one, be consistent in launching every week. We tell all of our, we kind of break our, we've talked about this since you've been up here, we break the ad spend level of our clients into three tiers, zero to three hundred dollars a day, three hundred to two thousand a day, and then two thousand plus. And I think a lot of people, they get in the cadence of weekly, but they get really comfortable with the number of ads. And so this is where one of the clients we're just talking about, and we had a chart we were looking

11:14SPEAKER_00at, was launching on average 6.2 ads per week, yet spending s over $2,000 per day. Right. And so the the volume the the spend volume doesn't it maybe it's inverse. The the the launch volume doesn't support the spend or the spend doesn't support the volume. It needs more volume in that. And so I think most people get comfortable in the the cadence and the volume they're doing, and then they hit a ceiling and they wonder why. So are you saying that volume that volume has to rise as spend

11:45SPEAKER_00volume rises? Yeah, it yeah, it does. I've got a chart.

11:48SPEAKER_01Do you want to this is a good time to show it? Let's pull let's pull it up. Yeah. Okay. Let's do it. So just to explain this chart, this is not average, these are actually companies that are successful. And a lot of these are NPM clients. They're not all NPM clients. But along the X axis here is an average weekly ad spend. And along the uh Y axis here is the number of ads that they typically launch. And you can see, particularly at the low end, it's pretty noisy, but you'd sort of expect that because these are people that are just starting out. They haven't really quite figured out, you know, how to do

12:19SPEAKER_01ads yet. Frankly, it's really frustrating when you're just starting out because you don't know how to create good ads, right? And you need you know, five, hopefully, good ads a week. And and so that that that's a challenge.

12:32SPEAKER_00But if you look at this screen, real fast, for anyone who's listening on audio, uh, anyone who's listening on audio, we are we're we're on on YouTube right now, we're cutting to a screen that Cliff is actually screen sharing. So if you're on audio right now and you want to give some visuals, we're looking at a scatter plot that that Cliff is showing right here, and it's dotting out the the spend the number of ads by spend volume weekly. Yeah, it's a weekly spend volume? It's weekly spend volume, right? And the number of ads they launch per week, and we're looking at a little more than a hundred companies. And what is the requirement of the companies within this scatter plot?

13:03SPEAKER_01Well, it's adjustable, but for this one, they have to be spending at least an average of $100 a day.

13:08SPEAKER_00Okay.

13:09SPEAKER_01And they've got it, we've got to have data going back, I think, 20 weeks. So again, this is not the average. These are these are comp this is aspirational. This is what you should be shooting for. Because these companies are successful enough that they're surviving on.

13:22SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I'm just looking down here, looking down here in the corner. So the very top, like it you see the line going up. So the average moves, right? Right. What is the are you able to hover over? Is this just a screenshot or can you hover over this? Yeah, no, I can hover over. What's the very top right? So the very top, top right, how much are they spending per week? Oh man, they're spending 36,000 per week, and they're doing 50 new ads a week a week. Yeah. Yeah. So like you could definitely now there are some in here that are launching a really low like a low volume. What's that very bottom one but has a decent amount of spend? Yeah, what's it?

13:52SPEAKER_01Right. So this guy has got 18,000 in spend and he's only doing two ads a week. Now that's possible, right? Every business is different. So in that case, and I I don't I can't tell from this who he is. I I could tell, but we're obviously not sure. We're hiding. Yeah, we're hiding the company's names. But there are businesses where you can get away with that. You know, for example, if your audience is changing all the time, then you don't need fresh ads. So if you're something like a wedding photographer or a personal injury attorney or or something where the need is kind of short term and your audience is changing, then yeah, you don't need

14:23SPEAKER_01as much of a flow of ads as, for instance, a you know, a DTC cosmetics type advertiser. Because there the ads are continually being shown to the same audience. And it's got to be new and fresh, right, for them to look at it and read your message and hopefully click. So it does vary by by business, but most of the people that we're working with, and I think most of the people that NPM's working with are in that DTC space. And so the the that line, that dotted line there is probably a pretty good representation

14:53SPEAKER_01of of what they should be shooting for.

14:55SPEAKER_00Is there so is there like a trend in like let's say I'm spending, are we able to see like what are the the people that are spending less than uh $1,000 a day, what how many ads on average they do? Is there any way that we could see something like that? Yeah, absolutely.

15:08SPEAKER_01It's it's here in the graph, right? So if you look at this yellow line or orange line, I'm not sure exactly how it's showing up, you can see it intersects right around five ads per week. So that's probably the minimum anybody should be doing.

15:21SPEAKER_00Five ads a week. Okay. And we recommend for zero to three hundred. Let me can I'm curious to measure this, because this is the uh this is feeling Josh. Right. Observation Josh against Data Cliff. Okay. All right. So this is actually really great. Now I went and I just filmed over 40 videos for our clients, so I hope I don't have to go redo all of it. But here's what here's what was my feelings. When you're less than $300 a day in spend, uh we're recommending three to five ads, and I say minimum because you can you can do more, sure. But three to five ads per week is what we've been recommending. And obviously diverse, not

15:51SPEAKER_00just like only change a headline. It's like, no, no, this is completely different ads every time. Three to five ads. And then once you start spending between 300 and 2,000, uh, we just kind of double the recommendation to like at least five to ten ads per week for up to 2K.

16:05SPEAKER_01Yeah, let's see where it kind of hits that 10 ads per week. So that was 14. That's 12, that's seven. So it's kind of in here. So what would that be if we find the closest dot? So uh, you know, according to the data here, and again, uh this is you know, data data is typically noisy, so you know, take these as guidelines. There's nothing chiseled in stone about this. But you know, it looks like about 7,500 or so you want to be at that 10 ads per week.

16:35SPEAKER_00Okay. So really once you start to touch over that $1,000 a day, essentially.

16:39SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, I mean, the the more good ads the better, right? Yeah. So you know we've got some other charts that we can show, but it only a few of your ads are going to carry the majority of your spend. Would it make sense to pull one of those up?

16:54SPEAKER_00So yes, and this would be this is really another interesting concept. While you pull that up, I'll keep talking here. Sure. Because one of the questions we always get is like, well, or an obs observation and then a question. Observation is meta puts all of my spend on this one ad, and I put all my heart and soul into all 10 ads that I launched. And it's heavy weighting, and no matter how many times I inject new ads, it always keeps going back to the OG ad that has been winning, and it goes back to that and back to that. And it almost like we're like emotionally burdened by it. And my stance has always been,

17:25SPEAKER_00eh, you just gotta you have to, it just means you you didn't create something better than what Meta already had, and you just gotta get better at the thing. Right. And so that's been my feeling observations, what I've seen. So, like, how do you what's the typical is there like an 80-20 on like 20% of the ads carry 80%? Like, what's the what's the observations you have?

17:44SPEAKER_01Well, it's even sharper than that. You know, it it's like the bottom between five and ten percent of your ads are probably gonna carry 80 to 90 percent of your spend. And that's just because of the way Meta works, which we can talk a little bit about. But here's one, this is a this is a pretty heavy hitter. They're spending $5,000 a day. But you can see the vast majority of their ads are getting less than $200 in spend. So even lifetime? Yeah, and then when lifetime. So even though they're pumping out almost 50 ads a week, the vast majority of them aren't really doing anything.

18:15SPEAKER_01Now, the problem, in some sense, is worse for them, right? Because they're they're trying to achieve this diversity, which we should probably talk about. But the more ads that you create, that hard that's the harder it is to find things that are diverse, right? Yeah. Now, for a smaller advertiser, you're trying to find that one winner, right? And if it's five percent of your ads are gonna be winners, and that