Hello. Today I’m going to talk about how we can create really robust ad accounts through essentially a huge volume of creatives.

When we take on clients, quite often I’ll get on a discovery call and they may be running ads already. I’ll look at their ads manager or ad account, or in fact go to this free resource — Meta Ads Library — where you can see anyone’s ads. Our competitors absolutely love it.

I’ll go in and see what they’re currently running. One of the key telltale signs is: I’ll come into their account and quite often there will be just like two ads running.

Even in terms of inactive, maybe they’ve tested like four ads, five ads — and it’s like: you haven’t even scratched the surface, especially if it’s a higher spending account.

So I’ve picked out three accounts: AJ Renewables, Kimbletech, and Solar Fast here. I’m going to talk through how robust these campaigns really are.

To be honest, they’re robust because we learned our lesson on this. We’ve had a few campaigns where it’s been too reliant on one creative pulling too much of the weight, and that creative tails off over time or even has a sharp decline. All of a sudden you’re in a real panic state when you were getting fantastic results before.

So we’ve made sure that all of our campaigns are as robust as possible. But there are some more detailed strategic reasons for this.

If we take a look at this: we’ve got a huge variety of ads here. Obviously our main thing is video — probably 80% is video — but we put a couple images in here as well.

Different angles, different reasons for someone to inquire, different things being talked about. Some of them are very heavy on social proof, some are a little bit more offer-based, some are more educational.

You know: talking to people about “you’ve already got solar panels, but here’s the problem,” and then going into why you could add battery storage.

And there are 37 ads live.

These are 37 ads that are either currently being tested, or have already been proven to be performing incredibly well and therefore scaled up within the ad account.

37 compared to when I approach most people on discovery calls and there’s like five or six — and they’re all the exact same format, the exact same style, which is typically price package ads.

There’s just zero robustness to their campaigns. Quite often I’ll come in and there’s been an agency managing it, right? And it will say on their active ads: launched January, launched February. It’s like: what are you paying these guys to do?

You see here with Adrian — this is just the ones that are live. These are all the ones that worked.

We’ve still got ads that are live from April, then some in June, then a whole heap in July, then a whole heap in August, and then we’ve already got some in September — and we’re on the 7th.

We’re constantly adding new creatives, and we’ve got basically a factory in the back end that is churning out between 15 and 20 creatives every day across the client portfolio.

And those creatives don’t just sit there — they go immediately into the testing campaign to make these campaigns robust.

Kimble Tech: again, 22 live ads running inside this ad account, all pulling the weight, or being tested quite actively.

You can see we’ve started testing a bulk of ads here in September primarily because we had one standout performer. That has been pulling heavy weight.

And the risk is: that’s great — you want that. A lot of people, especially if you’re running your own ads, would go: “Oh my god, I’ve got this amazing ad, this winner — it’s getting leads for £17. Let me put all the budget on that.” And personally, that’s what I’d do as well.

But our philosophy is: we want to build a campaign that goes from strength to strength, and is robust and sustainable over time.

Because there’s no point getting you 100 leads one month and 10 the next. I’d rather get you 55 this month and 55 the next, or 40 this month and 65 the next — and build that progressively, which is what actually works with the business and how you can cope with that demand.

So we could have just gone: “Let’s throw all the budget onto the winner.” In fairness, Meta does a decent job of that anyway because it realizes how strong a performer it is.

But what we need to ensure is that we’re still testing new creatives, still bringing new meat into the campaign for Meta to utilize.

The other piece is: different ads are going to appeal to different people.

So while we’ve got one ad that is clearly a standout performer, it’s likely that it’s capturing one customer demographic really effectively.

And lots of people are watching it and enjoying it, but they’re not actually converting off the back of it — or they are converting, but they’re getting a lot of the value and entertainment from the other ads in the campaign.

So you’ll notice we’ve got a real mixer. We’ve got some with Pres doing his thing — basically a TV presenter at this point. We’ve got some that are more social proof, customer interviews, all the way through. We’ve got some that are talking about tricky installs. We’ve got all sorts of different content that Meta has to choose from.

And it’s about it being a combined effort from all of the ads.

You might have one that’s incredibly good at converting — which the winner seems to be for this account — but you might have others that are doing a lot of background work in the campaign.

So when a prospect watches, say, 75% of the winning video, what’s going to happen is they’re going to enter a retargeting audience — same as if they visit Kimble’s website.

When they enter that audience, they’re then going to get hit with all of these. And Meta is going to continue to learn and assess which creatives are working best for that purpose — but more generally, just show them loads of content.

And the more someone watches of you, especially on video — which again comes back to doing video ads — the more they’re going to like you and the more they’re going to be inclined to inquire or go ahead and buy from you.

And of course, don’t forget this isn’t just about generating the lead. This is about getting them to go ahead with you as well.

Because what we found is: we get CPMs where it costs probably 2p to show someone one of these videos.

And if they’ve already become a lead and you’re working them through your sales process, you’re basically able to show them all this really high quality nurturing content for like 2p a hit.

What sales rep is going to be sending messages out for 2p a time in this quality, in this way?

It’s not like a one-to-one chase. It’s more natural — they’re just scrolling their social feed and they’re going to see you come up. It’s just not possible for a rep. This is why it’s so powerful.

And the same goes for Solar Fast: 43 active ads.

43 ads that are either in testing currently to find out if they are top performers, or are already proven to be top performers.

Think of how robust this campaign is. It’s not like one creative starts to tank and the whole thing tanks overnight.

And with the amount that someone like Solar Fast is spending on a monthly basis, you can’t afford for that to be the case. It’s too risky.

You might have an ad in here — I know we’ve got ads in here that are sub-£15 a lead — and it’s like: yes, we could just make a separate campaign and put a ton of budget and blast it, but it’s pointless because that ad will fatigue over time, or it will fluctuate, or it will be volatile.

It doesn’t make sense in the context of the broader business.

It would only make sense for us to look like we’re getting fantastic results that don’t actually correlate to what the plan was.

Bloody hell — slight ranting there — but it’s true. It really is true.

It’s about creating campaigns that serve the business that they’re for, right? And about actually putting the effort in.

Look at the amount of creatives launched.

September: that’s six.

August: 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15.

July: another two.

June: 3, 4.

Like insane volume of creatives — and that’s just the ones that are still live.

If I was to turn off active ads… let’s see… 51.

In fairness, Joe’s kind of cooked here because we’ve got 43 ads that are still live and 51 in total.

So we’ve only actually failed eight ads out of the ones that have launched, which is pretty insane.

I thought it was going to be harder than that, to be honest, but it just goes to show: build your campaigns in a way that provide long-term results.

Meta is often deemed to be a short-term lead gen platform, and it does have some of those characteristics.

But you can run the campaigns in a way that encourage it to perform over the long term — sustainably — and get you that demand that you need.

So there you go.