Your Glow Up

✅ Founder & Director of Your Glow Up: An Award-Winning DTC Growth Agency
✅ Growing DTC Brands by leveraging Performance Creatives and Ad Buying
✅ $37M+ driven by our creative
✅ Find out more at www.yourglowup.io 🚀

Founder | Director

Blue Finn Media

Managing Director of an award-winning growth consulting and performance marketing agency for eCommerce brands.

We partner with growth-focussed eCommerce brands, taking a CMO-based approach to hitting revenue goals through paid advertising, performance creative and growth consulting.

Learn more here: bluefinnmedia.com

Managing Director

scale & send

Co-Founder

upstarterr

Bristol Myers Squibb

Senior Specialist, Upstream MS&T Scientist

Process Development & Commercialisation Engineer

Ormonde Veterinary

Sales Associate

Glanbia Ingredients Ireland

Shift Worker

Big Leprechaun Moving & Storage

Furniture Mover

$41M+ Revenue Driven through our Creative // I Help DTC Brands Make Better Direct Response Ads // Founder @ Your Glow Up

Click the button in my featured section below 👇

If you run ads on Facebook, this is why you can't scale.

(i should be charging $7.5k for this)

I train performance marketing teams for several DTC brands.

And one of the biggest issues I see is media buyers not knowing WHAT they should to do next to improve results.

They can’t identify the bottleneck in their campaigns so they test random things, wasting a lot of time and thousands of $$$ in testing budget.

This is the ROAS Profit Matrix that I give to them to fix this problem, to quickly identify what they need to do to next to make more money from their ad campaigns 

It will help you:

✅ Audit ad accounts spending over 6-8 figures every month
✅ Find the exact bottleneck to increasing ROAS (to help you make more money)
✅ Identify when Meta is burning your money with poor tracking
✅ Understand the only three things you can do to increase ROAS
✅ Get DTC benchmarks for each key advertising metric
✅ Understand exactly what levers you need to pull to improve each metric

We use this ROAS Matrix every day internally at our agency, which allows us to identify bottlenecks and scale ad accounts in a fraction of the time.

One of my clients told me I should charge at least $7.5k for this.

But today I’m feeling nice, so you can have it for 100% free.

To get access, all you need to do is:

1. Connect with me Evan Carroll
2. Comment ‘ROAS’ below

And I’ll send the profit matrix over to you (no email sign-up needed).

Ps. I’ve included a 11-minute step-by-step training showing you exactly how to use the ROAS Profit Matrix effectively as a bonus, so be sure to get it while you can 🎁 

—

Feel free to repost if you find it valuable, to help someone in your network with their Facebook ads ♻️

Evan Carroll

Helping DTC Brands Scale 5+ New Ad Creatives Every Week // $150M+ In Trackable eCom Sales // DM me CREATIVE and let’s chat

How to get ad creative from your actual customers:

(I should not be giving this away)

We've been helping our clients source Customer Generated ad creative over the last year, which has helped us produce new winning ads in a fraction of the time.

This helps us create ads featuring actual customers of the brand who resonate more with the target audience, and as a result these ads scale A LOT more.

I’ve just put together a step-by-step training exclusively for my consulting clients showing how we do this, which walks through exactly how you can source ad creative for FREE from your customers.

I show:

✅ The exact end-to-end process of sourcing Customer Generated Content
✅ How to structure your offer to customers to get content from them
✅ The exact email to send to get this offer in front of your customers
✅ How to receive the filmed contact back from each customer
✅ How to turn this content into direct response ad creative
✅ The next steps on what you should do once you have this system setup
✅ And a lot more …

We make 2000+ ad creatives every month with the help of this system, which allows us to produce new winning ads in a fraction of the time.

One of my clients told me I should NOT be giving this process away.

But today I’m feeling nice, so you can have it all for 100% free.

To get access, all you need to do is:

1. Connect with me Evan Carroll
2. Comment 'CGC' below

And I'll send the training straight over (no email sign-up needed).

Ps. As a bonus, I’ll include the EXACT set of questions we ask customers to answer to help us make the best ads possible 🎁

—

Feel free to repost to help someone in your network with their Facebook ads ♻️

The LinkedIn creators they tell you not to worry about ...

(even Lara's OtterPilot)

Over the last few months I've been posting consistently on LinkedIn.

This has allowed me to:

→ Grow an audience of great people
→ Build my business using LinkedIn
→ Have access to so many new opportunities

But I didn't do it alone.

The main perk of building a personal brand, is building a great network as a direct result.

And today, I want to celebrate the 3 people that helped make it happen.


1. Lara Acosta: I first met Lara in a cigar lounge in Dubai Q4 last year when she was at 95k followers.

The growth she's had since then is amazing, and I learn something from her on LinkedIn every day.

She is the one who showed me the potential of the platform when you commit to it.


2. Conor Sunderland: I've known Conor for a long time, and his approach to content is second to none.

Has a great perspective on life, and posts daily about his insights on DTC email marketing and running an agency.

Definitely worth a follow.


3. Ciaran Finn: is one of my long time friends and we started posting on LinkedIn at the same time.

Being able to work together to solve the problems we face and learn from each other's mistakes has been invaluable.

I wouldn't enjoy LinkedIn as much as I do if we weren't working together every day to improve our strategy.


I started posting on LinkedIn for the opportunities.

But I stayed because of the people.

So do me a favour and give the three people above a follow to show some love.

You won't regret it.

Anyone who claims creative fatigue is an issue for them

Is just not that good at making ads.

The whole ideas of ad fatigue is that your target audience has seen an ad of yours multiple times.

So it has stopped converting them into paying customers.

But here’s the thing:

Unless your target audience is extremely niche, your TAM (Total Addressable Market) should be millions of people.

And to reach true ad fatigue with a TAM of millions of people.

You have to spend A LOT of ad dollars.

A lot more than people think.

So why do ads stop working as budget increases?

As Facebook shows your ad to colder and colder audiences, the ad is not compelling enough to convert these colder audiences.

Which is not an indicator of creative fatigue.

But instead is an indicator of a ad just not being that good.

So instead of blaming creative fatigue for your ads not scaling.

Stop making excuses, and start making better ads.

Paid ads are NOT the only way to grow a DTC business.

(unlike some people on here would have you believe)

Too many obsess over their ROAS on an hourly basis.

While completely overlooking the levers that deliver long-term profitable growth.

Things like:

1. Making compelling ad creative
2. Having a clear product market fit
3. Using Whitelisting to it's maximum potential
4. Building an rolodex of influencers that align with your audience
5. Capturing as many customer reviews as possible
6. Having social proof everywhere on your website
7. Nurturing your customer base with high-quality Email and SMS campaigns
8. Constantly listening to your customers and applying their feedback
9. Deploying resources towards building a strong community
10. Having relentless focus on improving your product

If you want to build a real brand, the perfect direct response ad funnel ALONE will not get you there.

You need to have diversified sources of revenue.

For a growing $2-$10M DTC brand, a healthy revenue breakdown may look like:

→ 50% Paid media
→ 25% Email and SMS
→ 25% Organic

One of the biggest benefits of this strategy is that nothing happens in a vacuum; each channel executed correctly improves the performance of all others.

So stop worrying about yesterday’s ROAS.

Start building a sustainable DTC business.

When making your next set of ad creatives.

Remember that no one cares about your brand.

Always assume that:

1. No one knows about OR cares about your brand

2. No one has the time to watch any of your ads

3. No one cares about what you say unless it clearly relates to them

Too many brands get lost in the magical fairy world of 'brand-land'.

Thinking that all people want to do is go to Instagram and watch their branded ads.

I've got bad news for you.

They go on Instagram to watch more Hawk Tuah memes.

Not to learn about your brand's sustainability pledge.

Your ads have to give the viewer a CLEAR reason to watch your ad and buy your products.

 So if you want to acquire new customers and scale your brand, make your ads all about the viewer.

Not the other way around.

When making performance ad creative.

You need to be ok with failure.

No person, brand, or agency has a 100% creative hit rate.

Most ads don't work.

You need to be comfortable with 8 out of every 10 ideas being a flop.

And not let this discourage you.

Even the best of the best have a creative hit rate of 25%

No one gets it right all the time.

Instead: 

1. Come up with your creative hypothesis
2. Test that hypothesis
3. Extract key learnings from the test
4. Apply those learnings to the entire creative strategy moving forward
5. Use these learnings to come up with your next hypothesis

Be willing to be punched in the face over and over again and still keep on testing.

And when you find that unicorn ad that scales, all the failed tests will be worth it.

I speak to 40+ DTC brand owners a month

97% iterate on their creative the wrong way

Most of the brands I speak to waste their time iterating on losing ads.

They take a crappy ad, slap a new hook on it, and expect it to be transformed into their next unicorn winner.

Here's why that doesn't work:

There are two types of Facebook ad metrics.

1. Hard metrics → CPA, ROAS etc.
2. Soft metrics → Hook Rate, Hold Rate, CTR etc.

Hard metrics are the ones that matter.

They tell you if an ad is working or not, and hence if it is worth iterating on.

Hard metrics help you differentiate the winners from the losers.

If an ad has bad hard metrics, it's not worth iterating on.

Soft metrics should only be used as a guide to help improve ads that already have strong hard metrics.

As changing the hook on a crappy ad far below target CPA, will still leave you with a crappy ad far below target CPA.

So if all of your ad creatives are bad, instead of creating iterations on bad ads do this instead:

→ Export all customer reviews from the last 6 months
→ Feed this data to an AI creative strategist
→ Analyze the data to uncover the 5 most common pain points
→ Use AI to ideate 3 new creative ideas for each pain point
→ Use AI to order these creative ideas in descending order of strength
→ Make 15 new ads starting at the top of the list and work your way down
→ Create 5 variations of each ad which will give you 75 ads in total
→ Create a testing campaign with an ad set for each pain point
→ Test with a budget suitable for your brand's AOV
→ Run for 5 - 7 days

You will be left with some winning ads and some losing ads based on your target CPA/ROAS.

1. Iterate on the winning ads
2. Double down on the angles in your winning ads in your next creative round
3. Take learnings from the losing ads 
4. Do more of what works, stop doing what doesn't work 

Simple, but not easy.

Unless you love burning dollars.

STOP turning off winning ads.

I’ve audited a lot of ad accounts over the last few months.

One of the most common issues I see is paid media teams turning off creatives that:

→ Used to be a winner
→ Recently stopped working

Instead of throwing that winning concept in the bin

Try this instead to squeeze out more performance:

→ Create a new campaign
→ Create an ad set for each winning ad
→ Optimise for “Cost per result”
→ Set the cost cap 25% higher than your actual goal

One that is published:

→ Monitor how much Facebook spends on it
→ Increase your cost caps if it's not spending
→ Gradually lower the cost caps if you are seeing performance

A great way of resurrecting ads from the dead.

And squeezing out extra performance from winning concepts.

If you use Hook rate to measure the success of your ads:

You're burning your hard earned $$$.

Too many advertisers promote high hook rates as if it is a sign of a winning ad.

But a high hook rate is NOT an indicator of success..

Let's look at two example ads in the same account to explain:

→ Ad 1 has a 26% Hook rate but has received $127,000 in spend

→ Ad 2 has a 47% Hook rate but has received $1,247 in spend

Why is this?

Because Ad 1 qualifies ideal customers, and disqualifies everyone else.

Where Ad 2 is speaking to everyone, but as a results speaks to no one.

This doesn't mean that all winning ads have bad Hook rates.

In fact, many times they do have the best Hook rate in the account.

It just means that it is NOT what you should be optimising for.

You should be optimising for metrics that contribute to your bottom line by bringing new customers to your business profitably.

And using secondary metrics like Hook rate to determine how to improve on ads that are already winning.

So next time you're running an analysis of the ads in your account, always remember:

Hard metrics (nROAS, nCPA) are what you always should be optimising for.

Unless you want to treat your business like it's a charity.

And in that case, Hook rate should work just fine.

Let's face it, your ad Hooks aren't good enough.

Here are 5 Hook tactics to change that:


1. Pain-Point Call Out

Start your ad calling out the direct pain point your ICP suffers from.

It will hook the right people in.

Which will help Meta's targeting.


2. Failed Solution Bashing

Directly bash the failed solutions your costumer's have previously tried.

No one likes buying something and not getting the wished for.

So bash competitor products, extreme new habits, alternative solutions etc.


3. Extreme Emotion

Pry at extreme human emotions in the first three seconds.

Fear, joy, fear of missing out, and pain all work well.


4. Sell the End Result

Customers aren't buying your products, they are buying an end result.

Call out the desired end result your ICP badly wants, which will keep them watching as they will want to find out how they can achieve it.

Questions work well here -'Do you want to X, but don't know how?'


5. Use Split-Screens

Show distinct before and after states by using split-screens in post production.

To take this to the next level, use your customer's failed solution as the before visual and their desired end result as the after visual.


—


All of these tactics open a loop in the viewer's mind, which will give them no choice to continue watching to continue watching.

Ps. Are there any other tactics you'd add to the list?


Feel free to repost to help someone in your network with their Hooks ♻️

Is a high FB ROAS not helping your brand's bottom line?

This could be the reason why:

Last month, I audited the Facebook ad account of an 8-figure supplement brand.

They were spending $175k a month with a ROAS well above their target.

But this was having little to no effect on their bottom line.

Why?

Their entire account was using 7-day click 1-day view attribution, which resulted in significant over-attribution.

When including 1-day view attribution as a large brand with multiple marketing channels, Facebook takes more credit than it should.

This is best explained using an example:

John is swiping through Instagram stories, when someone rings his doorbell and he goes to answer it.

He leaves his phone open, and the stories keep swiping through and eventually lands on one of your ads while he is still at the door, and then moves on to the next story.

John's account has technically 'seen' your ad, even though he has no idea who your brand is.

Later that day John is scrolling through TikTok, sees one of your ads, clicks through and buys right there and then.

Even though TikTok is what drove the sale, Facebook will still claim that as a purchase as your ad was 'viewed' by John's account.

But Facebook had nothing to do with it.

So you increase your Facebook ad budget because of this apparent high ROAS. 

But your brand's bottom line is unaffected.

This is an extreme example, but with people using social media every minute of every day, scenarios like this happen a lot more than you think.

The solution?

For larger brands with multiple marketing channels, your Facebook campaigns should be optimised for 1-day click or 7-day click most of the time.

This may under-attribute on Facebook slightly, but it only attributes high-intent purchases.

Whereas the standard Facebook attribution, which includes 1-day view addition, can cannibalise your bottom line.

By making you think you have made all these extra sales, which in reality these are phantom sales captured by a generous attribution setting.

This leads you to think that your Facebook campaigns are doing great.

When your bank account is telling a whole different story.

This may not be the case for every brand, but it is definitely something to watch out for.

Always remember:

All attribution settings are wrong, they are just varying degrees of wrong.

Some help your business, others harm it.

Has your best ad stopped working like it used to?

Here's what you can do about it:

1. Performance-Based Iterations

An iteration is when you change an ad, based on data from inside of the ad account.

If an ad has a good CAC but a bad thumb-stop ratio, you can change the hook to a higher-performing hook currently in your account, while keeping the body of the ad the same.

The theory behind this is that the overall messaging of the ad is persuasive - hence the low CAC.

So if we improve the hook and keep the rest of the ad the same, we will hook more of the 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 audience in and this convert more people.

This is just one iteration you can make.

Some other ideas for you to use may be:

→ Cutting out dead space in the ad to improve pacing
→ Recreating the concept using a different creator
→ Creating a mashup of the ad including footage of multiple different people


2. Change the Creative Type

Most advertisers don't understand that people use social media in different ways.

So by changing the creative type of the concept, you can reach and convert an entirely new audience using the same validated angle.

An example of this could be taking a winning static concept from your ad account, and developing that into a video concept.

The main creative types on paid social are:

→ Videos
→ GIFs
→ Statics
→ Carousels

Feel free to take a winning concept in any one of the above four types, and redevelop that into one of the other types to keep extracting value out of that winning concept.


3. Whitelisting

Similarly to how different creative types convert different people, whitelisted ads can convert people that a normal branded ad simply would not.

Whitelisting helps get past the 'as blindless' that most social media users experience, and acts as a Trojan Horse to help catch their attention first - and then deliver the message of the ad.

Simply re-running a fatigued ad under a whitelisted page can revive performance and convert new customers.

A tactic that works for us specifically is:

1. Taking an old winning ad that has now fatigued
2. Creating 5-6 hook variations
3. Relaunching these variations under a whitelisted page

95% of the time this finds a new creative winner.

—

In summary, stop blaming ad fatigue for ads not working anymore and start doing something about it.

And if you do, the three tactics above are a great place to start.

Ps. Is there anything else you'd add to the list?

We've halved the work required to make winning ads

By getting creative with our aspect ratios

I'm asked every day what the best aspect ratio for ad creatives is, and there's no one right answer.

9:16, 4:5 and 1:1 all work well in specific situations.

However, here's what we do at our agency to have all aspect ratios covered:

→ Videos are made in 9:16 with a built-in 4:5 safe zone
→ Statics are made in 9:16 with a built-in 1:1 safe zone

The goal of this is to make every ad as compatible as possible with each ad placement.

This means only one ad format has to be made, which can then be run on all available formats due to the safe zones.

Last year we produced every video asset in 9:16 and 4:5, but this change has allowed us to halve post-production times

An important point to note is to make sure that no key visuals in the 9:16 ad are cut off 4:5 ad.

If that is the case, it will have to be reformatted manually or else the integrity of the ad will be compromised.

But this tactic should work for 80% of ads, which will save you and your team a lot of time.

—

Do you do anything differently to reformat your ads?

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