I often get asked:

"How do you confidently and consistently reduce your clients CPA in the first 90 days of working with you?"

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(Truth is the last 3 brands we brought on for ads had their CPA's cut by 34%, 47% and 85% each within the first 90 days)

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The answer: constant testing and iteration.

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And I’m not talking testing Meta lookalike audiences or call to action button colors…

I’m talking about the variables which ACTUALLY matter in 2024.

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1. Ad Creative Production and Optimisation

53% of the Meta bidding outcome is now down to your creative.

You need a higher quality and volume of creative to succeed than ever, and every ad account is different.

When taking over an account, we deep dive into current creatives and data to establish:

- What is working? Hooks, media types (static, GIF, video etc), placements etc.
- Why is it working? What angles are resonating, and what is most profitable.

Truth is most accounts we inherit have ZERO testing process in place and as a result ZERO idea whats really moving the needle - effectively leaving them shooting in the dark.

From here we creative a roadmap of testing and reporting.

1. Set out hypothesis about angles and media types that are working.
2. Set up feedback loops and tests around these.
3. Analyse the results of the tests. Best and worst performers as well as creative metrics like:
   1. Click through rate
   2. Thumb stop rate
   3. Hold rate
NOTE: Be very careful when analysing results, if an ad has a very high CTR, but low TSR, it could have potential to be a winner simply by changing the hook and improving the TSR.
   Equally if it’s the other way round, keep the hook but change the body and CTA of the ad.
   
2. Get to work on your next batch of creatives…

From here, start scaling budgets for winning creatives, discarding the losers, and iterating on the ones that have potential.

Take the winning angles from your first batch and double down on them.

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3. Landing Page Optimisation

One of the easiest ways to increase the performance of your ads has NOTHING to do with your ads.

95% of brands chronically neglect the post click experience.

If you have an ad angle that works you need to carry this through to the post click experience with:

• Listicles
• Advertorials
• Squeeze pages

These are super easy to create with tools like Replo or Shogun, and can have a huge impact on overall ROAS.

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3. Media Buying

I have this one last on my list, reason being its less important that it was in 2020.

As mentioned in the creative section, creative is way more important in 2024 and testing things like:

• -1% v 5% lookalike audiences
• Micro exclusions and ad sets based on pixel events like add to carts
• Testing interest audiences
• Manually scaling ad set budget optimisation

In 2024 your ad account needs to be consolidated and simplified as much as possible. With the rise of features like:

• Advantage +
• Dynamic Creative Testing
• Performance Max Campaigns (Google)

It is clear ad platforms want you to give them your creative and copy, and let them find the ideal audience and optimise budget distribution accordingly.

In fact most of the best practises from 2020 would do nothing but strangle the artificial intelligence learning, and in turn ad account performance in 2024.

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Less campaigns, less micro optimisations, MORE (and better) CREATIVE.

And there you have it, 3 key levers you can pull to cut your CPA.

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