Hi guys! I spent about 800K on Facebook ads last year and thought I would share some insight into what works best. Especially as it is not as complex as it seems at first glance. 1. CBO TESTINGWe can all agree that Facebook is rather smart. Facebook wants you to get sales so that you come back and spend even more on their ads platform. This is the foundation for this simple account structure. For each of the big product categories you have (Tenst, Snowboards, Jacket, etc) you should have one CBO prospecting (testing) campaign. This means that you should have one CBO for all your jacket ads, one for all your snowboard ads, and one for all your jacket ads. The goal of this prospecting campaign is only to find the best-performing ads that hit certain KPIs in terms of CPA and/or ROAS. The theory behind this is simple. As I stated in the opening, Facebook is smart, they want us to yield great results from their platform. Thus we should help Facebook optimize as best as possible. By having one CBO prospecting campaign for each category, we let each CBO campaign get data on a specific customer type. By only feeding snowboard creatives into the snowboard CBO, we help Facebook define a specific audience. As the Snowboard CBO gets more and more data, it is easier for Facebook to show ads to the correct audience, the snowboarders. If we had gone the other way around and had one big prospecting CBO across all categories, we wouldn't make it easier for Facebook to target the correct audience, in fact, we make it harder. In addition to that, Facebook might find a winning creative from one adset, and give that all the spend. That means that we won't sell much from the other categories. Why do we test in a CBO and not an ABO? If we test in an ABO we force spending to each adset, and unless we have a 100% hit ratio of good creatives inside the adsets, we are doomed to lose money, resulting in lower profit margins. But if we on the other hand do the testing in a CBO we allow Facebook to determine what adsets and creatives to spend on. The ones that are most likely to perform the best will get the majority of the spend. This way we avoid spending on bad-performing ads.

I'm sure this story has been written a million times, but I'm doing my best NBA prospect impersonation and hit a 1 and done. The client relationship dynamic is toxic. Everyone is underpaid. The fire drills are frequent. Too many people work there just so they can give orders on the client side down the road. They pay for awards and shove them in their newsletters. There's a mentality that "this is how it is." Before going into my first agency gig, I considered myself a driven and hard-working individual. I've held several jobs simultaneously, working 70+ hours with freelance work. But somehow, the hours working in an agency were so painstaking that it made me question what I was doing in my career. I dreaded my alarm every morning just because I knew I had to spend my day working this job. I spent thousands on training programs to move horizontally into different agency expertise. I made a portfolio reviewed by directors/VPs and was considered a beyond-qualified candidate. I joined clubs about this expertise and networked my ass off. I met with countless talent directors. Didn't matter. I was told by hundreds of people that I'd need to take a $15/hr internship first. I didn't go to one of the best advertising universities in the world to be asked to take an internship in my mid-20s. I thought this might be an isolated problem. From what I've researched and several others' stories, it's widespread. This isn't normal. In other industries, jobs that require this many hours and deal with these toxic work environments, you're compensated for it. At a much different level of expertise, think IB. Yeah, you're working 120 hours and are a cog to these giant banks, but you're paid fairly. At agencies, we're asked to work 65+ hour weeks, get on our knees for clients, and are supposed to accept a salary teachers make. Instead, I'm going to work for a company that actually cares about its people and respects their skills. I'm getting paid more than I would be making at the director level in an agency. I'm doing a creative and analytical role. I'm not being pigeonholed into the agency-to-client pipeline.