Zachary Murray

Foreplay.co

Bootstrapping the fuck out of foreplay.co

Creative Director / Growth Design

Phil Kiel

Before you blame your creative strategy, run this checklist:

✅ **Are you launching new ads weekly?**
Pick a consistent day (e.g., Wednesday) to launch. This removes emotional decision-making and creates a clear deadline for content creation.

✅ **Are you launching *considered* ads?**
1–2 high-quality ads, not 15 versions of the same idea.

✅ **Are you iterating, not duplicating?**
A new angle or hook beats slight tweaks to the same footage.

✅ **Are you matching activity to budget?**
Small spend? Take fewer swings. 2–3 ads per week can still move the needle.

✅ **Are your ads staying native?**
Minimal text overlays. Match the platform’s style.

Do the boring, consistent work. It’s how accounts grow.

Creative and Paid Social at Taikun Digital - Ecom success powered by Paid Social and Creative Strategy - transparent and profitable performance marketing for brands.

"Should we scale this campaign or is it just bottom-funnel swooping?"

Just showed a brand how to measure incrementality without NorthBeam or Triple Whale.

Set up a custom conversion tracking Google referrals. Tracks cost per person who clicks your Meta ad, then comes back to your site via Google.

Why this matters:

Someone who sees your ad, searches your brand on Google, then converts = high-intent traffic. You created demand.

Someone who clicks your ad and converts immediately = might have converted anyway. Could be retargeting, could be bottom-funnel.

The comparison:

Campaign A (partnership content): £X cost per Google referral

Campaign B (DPA catalogue): £Y cost per Google referral

If A is cheaper, it's more incremental. You're creating demand that other channels capture.

If B is cheaper... it might just be efficient retargeting. Not necessarily incremental growth.

How to set it up:

Meta Events Manager → Custom Conversions → Create
All URL traffic (not purchase)
Referring domain contains: google.com
Add as column in Ads Manager

Now you can see which campaigns drive high-intent traffic at what cost.

The example from today's audit:

DPA campaign: higher cost per reach, higher Google referral cost

Partnership campaign: lower cost per reach, lower Google referral cost

Before scaling DPA, we needed to know: is this incremental or just closing deals partnership ads opened?

The Google referral data answered that question.

You don't need expensive attribution tools to measure incrementality. You need the right custom conversions and the willingness to look beyond last-click ROAS.

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Focusing solely on bottom of funnel conversions will only get you so far.

Here’s the problem: when all your Meta ad spend goes toward conversions, you risk bottlenecking your pipeline. You risk retargeting the same pool over and over.

The fix? Shift some spend toward upper-funnel awareness. Build long-term engagement and a healthier pipeline by balancing the funnel.

**Do this:**
- Start small: allocate 2-5% of your budget to upper funnel campaigns.
- Use existing creative from conversion campaigns to test awareness cheaply.
- Track CPM, CPMr, Organic Traffic, engagement metrics to measure impact.

**Rule of thumb:** A balanced funnel feeds itself. Starve the top, and conversions eventually dry up.

If your audience growth is stalling, start here.

Stop day-trading your ad account.

If you’re reacting to daily performance swings, you’re making reactive decisions, and that’s a fast track to volatility.

Instead, adopt a **weekly cadence** for media buying. Here’s the system I recommend for brands seeing volatility:

**Monday:** Scale budgets. Review last week’s performance and allocate spend to what’s working.

**Wednesday:** Launch new ads. Give fresh creative time to gather data mid-week.

**Friday:** Pause underperformers. Free up budget going into the weekend.

Why it works:
- Reduces emotional over-reactions to daily metrics.
- Builds momentum by focusing on consistent, predictable actions.
- Stabilizes performance, especially for solo founders or small teams.
- Frees up time to focus on high impact areas (offer, creative, seeding, partnerships, product...)

If your account feels like a rollercoaster, start here. Predictable beats reactive every time.

Spend goes up, Reach goes up, but so does CPMr.

If this goes on for too long it can flip your model upside down, the CPC, AOV, CVR needed to make the account work is out of reach. 

Here's the playbook to reducing your CPMr, by Q4 2026 you may wish you started these things today...

Inside Meta:
- Creative diversity (levels to this)
- New partnerships, running ads from new pages
- Increasing exclusions if necessary
- Account consolidation - not always required but having too many campaigns can increase frequency and therefore CPMr
- Testing upper funnel objectives

Outside Meta:
- Improving Organic Search and Organic Social activity
- New products
- Partnerships with other brands, licensing

"Who cares about CPMr, I still get a 10x ROAS" Ok I get it, but if your CPMr doubles like the example below, what part of your funnel is going to improve to maintain the efficiency?

Most teams overcomplicate creative testing.

Multiple ad sets, fragmented campaigns, and scattered data. The result? No clear signal. Just noise.

**Here’s the better approach:**
- Consolidate all creatives into a single campaign with one ad set.
- Use CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) to let the platform find the winner.
- Let it run long enough to generate confident insights.

Why it works:
- Cleaner data: One ad set = fewer variables muddying performance.
- Faster learning: The platform allocates spend dynamically based on results.
- Easier iteration: Once you know what works, you can scale or test variations.

If your campaigns feel chaotic, start here. Simplify the structure, and watch the signal emerge.

"Every time I raise my budget, CPA tanks for days. So I just duplicate winning campaigns at small budgets."

Just got off a call with a founder spending $30k/month across 8 duplicate campaigns. Same ads. Same targeting. Small budgets. All because scaling one campaign caused CPA to spike from $19 to $40.

This is the hardest way to run an account.

Three campaigns improve. Three get worse. Next day it reverses. You're constantly seesawing between which campaigns are working and which aren't.

Here's what's actually happening:

When you duplicate campaigns, you're forcing Meta to run separate auctions for the same ads against the same audiences. Each campaign is competing with itself for delivery.

Result: fragmented data, inconsistent performance, permanent learning phase across all campaigns.

The fix:

One campaign. One ad set. All ads competing in the same auction with consolidated budget and data.

"But when I scale one campaign, performance tanks."

Yes. For 3-5 days. Then it stabilizes. That's the algorithm expanding reach beyond your warmest audiences.

The solution isn't to avoid the dip by fragmenting into small campaigns. It's to build a routine that removes decision-making fatigue:

Monday: increase budget
Wednesday: launch new creative
Friday: pause underperforming ads

Boring. Systematic. Predictable.
Stop jet skiing. Start cruise shipping.

Most founders at $30k/month are trying to day-trade their way to $60k/month. They're making 50 micro decisions per week and wondering why the account is unstable.

The accounts that scale to $100k+? They picked a structure, stuck with it for 60+ days, and optimized at the ad level, not the campaign level.

You can't find a winning structure if you blow it up every time performance dips for three days.

"I'm going to make 5 new ads per week."

Reality: 1 ad in the last month.

Just got off a call with a founder who's the sole creative producer for a $30k/month account. His goal: 5 ads per week. His output: 1 ad in 30 days.

He's not lazy. He's running the entire business. Product development, customer service, operations. Then at 5pm on Thursday he remembers "I need to make ads today."

This is the pattern at every DTC brand between $20k-50k/month.

Here's what I told him:

Stop aiming for 5 ads per week. Aim for 2 really different ads per week.

Not 10 variations of the same talking head with different b-roll.

2 conceptually distinct ads:
Different emotional driver (fear vs aspiration)
Different objection (price vs efficacy)
Different proof type (reviews vs before/after)
Different format (UGC vs demo vs static)

Quality over quantity. Conceptual diversity over asset volume.

The bigger issue: no creative system.

He's using ChatGPT to generate 20 different angles. Half are relevant. Half are worthless. He's overwhelmed before he even starts.

The fix: Pick 2-3 core pillars. That's it.

For his brand (male personal care):
Performance/results
Convenience/routine
Confidence/identity

Every ad speaks to one of those three things. No more angle brainstorming. No more analysis paralysis.

Then build the weekly routine:

Monday: increase budget
Wednesday: launch 2 new ads (1-2 per pillar)
Friday: pause underperforming ads

Boring. Systematic. Removes decision fatigue.

Most founders think they need 50 ads per month to scale. They actually need 8-12 conceptually different ads and a structure that lets those ads get meaningful spend.

At $30k/month, creative production capacity is the bottleneck, not budget, not account structure, not Meta's algorithm.

Build the creative system first. Then scale budget.

The accounts spending $100k+/month? They solved creative production before they hit $50k/month. They didn't try to scale first and figure out creative later.

If you're the sole creative producer and you're already struggling at $30k/month, you won't make it to $60k/month without either hiring creative help or building a sustainable 2-ads-per-week system.

Stop trying to be a creative agency. Start being a brand with a repeatable creative process.

Your campaigns don’t just drive direct conversions, they influence other channels too. Ignoring this leaves money on the table.

Here’s how to fix it:

Step 1️⃣ 
Create a custom conversion to track Google referrals:
Separate conversions for all Google traffic (paid and organic), Brand Search, Shopping, PMax. Measure visits that come via Google after Meta ad engagement.

🛠️ Setup
For all Google traffic use [Referring Domain] contains [Google]
For a specific campaign such as Brand Search, reference your UTM: [all URL traffic where URL] contains [campaign=###]

Step 2️⃣ 
Analyse placement efficiencies. Which ads and placements drive the most Google referral traffic? (Hint: Different placements impact referrals at different rates, Instagram Stories and Reels often win.)

Step 3️⃣ 
Use this data to optimize. Double down on placements and creatives that amplify cross, channel lift. If your Brand Search gets a 10x ROAS, how do you scale this on Meta?

🤔 Why it matters 
If Meta ads are fueling high, converting Google traffic, you can justify scaling spend, even at lower ROAS.

Stop measuring ads in silos. Build systems that show the full picture.

If your creative win rate isn’t on your radar, it should be.

**What is win rate?**
It’s the percentage of ads spending your threshold testing budget and exceeding your target KPI. This metric tells you which formats, angles, and creators consistently deliver results, and which don’t.

**Why it matters:**
Tracking win rate lets you identify patterns in performance. For instance, graphic ads might outperform video. Certain angles (“noisy restaurants” or “German engineering”) may win repeatedly. Knowing this allows you to focus resources where they’ll drive the most impact.

**How to use it:**
- Audit your creative formats: Which types (static, animation, video) have the highest win rate?
- Double down on angles: Look at your top-performing narratives and replicate them.
- Refine creator partnerships: Measure creator performance by win rate, not just spend.

**Rule of thumb:** A strong win rate is 10–20%. If it’s lower, you’ll need to test more ads to find winners.

Measure win rate consistently. It’s a clearer signal than chasing ROAS alone.

Wrong diagnosis. Launching more creative isn’t the solution. 

Here’s the pattern I keep seeing:
- Brands launch 50+ ad assets per week, thinking volume equals better odds.
- They dilute their resources, making it impossible to analyze what’s working.
- “Winners” don’t scale because the system is built for churn, not momentum.

What’s actually happening:
Most accounts aren’t winning because they don’t have 50 great ideas to test. Over-testing stretches bandwidth and makes it harder to spot the real outliers.

What works instead:
- **Reduce volume.** 5–10 well-thought-out ads per week is plenty.
- **Consolidate spend.** Let good creative pick up momentum over time.
- **Stop day-trading.** Focus on long-term performance, not micro-adjustments every 1-3 days.

If your ad account feels chaotic, start by cutting your weekly launches in half. Fewer inputs, clearer insights, better results.

The difference between good brands and unicorns? Aggression.

Aggressive budgets. Aggressive ROAS targets. Aggressive messaging. Aggressive creator seeding. Aggressive margins.

Scaling isn’t about playing it safe. It’s about pushing every lever harder.

Testing more ads isn’t the problem. How you’re launching them is.

**Partnership ads** are one of the most underutilized tools for brands with a strong founder presence. Here’s why they work:

- They leverage personal trust and authenticity. Audiences engage differently when they see a person, not a brand.

- Meta’s algorithm favors them. Partnership ads often deliver **lower CPMs** and **higher click-through rates**, which compounds across your campaigns.

Here’s how to implement them:

1. **Run high-performing founder content as partnership ads** under the founder’s profile, with partnership status enabled. Let Meta decide the best identity.

2. **Launch consistently.** Start with 2 partnership ads per week alongside your other creative.

3. **Don’t overcomplicate.** Use existing content and focus on conversational, natural settings. Founder content works because it feels human—not polished.

If your CPM is creeping up, or your frequency is climbing past 3.5 over 7 days, this is where I’d start.

Daily ROAS swings aren't the problem. The real issue? Reacting to them.

Rolling 3-day averages tell you what’s actually happening. Stop pausing ad sets because of one bad day. Zoom out.

We're still speaking to brands spending $500k - $1mil per month who aren't:
- measuring funnel impact.  
- running TOF campaigns correctly.

Two slides we give away as a starting point 👇

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The Battle

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