Rich, poor, and smart

Yesterday I told you that when your CPA climbs, it's usually not a traffic problem ... it's a messaging problem.

Today I want to show you the three ways founders try to fix it.

I call this the "Rich, Poor, and Smart" framework.

This is when you just crank up the budget. You go from $10K/day to $25K/day and force the algorithm to spend the money.

It works. Sort of.

Meta will find new people. But you're paying a premium to reach less qualified prospects with the same old message. Your CPA explodes because you're essentially buying your way into colder audiences without changing what you're saying to them.

I watched a supplement brand do this. They went from $15K/day to $40K/day in two weeks. Their reach doubled. Their CPA went from $38 to $71.

They were spending more to make less. Not exactly a winning strategy.

This is the "guru" method. Run cheap Video Views or Awareness campaigns to build warm audiences, then retarget them later.

The problem? The Video Views algorithm optimizes for people who like to watch videos. Not people who like to buy things.

You'll get tons of cheap views. You'll build big warm audiences. And then you'll wait months for them to convert ... if they ever do.

A skincare brand tried this. They spent $18K on video views over 60 days, built an audience of 340,000 people, and retargeted them with purchase campaigns.

The retargeting CPA was higher than their cold traffic CPA. They'd built an audience of "watchers," not buyers.

Here's the method that actually works.

You expand your reach by changing who the ad speaks to.

Let me give you an analogy. Say you sell activewear and all your ads feature basketball players. Eventually, you saturate the basketball market.

But if you launch new ads featuring football players, the algorithm automatically finds people who are into football ... a completely new audience.

You didn't increase your budget. You didn't run awareness campaigns. You didn’t even change the way your ads are targeted. You just changed who the creative speaks to, and Meta found new people who are just as likely to buy.

An apparel brand did this. They'd been running ads focused on "gym bros" for months. CPA was climbing. They launched a new batch of ads featuring women in yoga studios.

Within 10 days, their volume increased without a significant increase in CPA. Same product. Same offer. Different audience. Different message.

The lesson: You don't scale by spending more or running cheaper campaigns. You scale by speaking to new segments of your market.

But here's where it gets tricky (and this is what I'll cover tomorrow): Meta's algorithm has changed. There's been an algorithm shift called "Andromeda" which makes creative diversity mandatory.

If you don't understand how it works, Meta will ignore most of your ads ... even if they're good.

I'll explain tomorrow.

My question for you: When you think about your product, how many different "types" of customers could use it? Are your ads only speaking to one of them?

Hit reply and tell me. I'd love to hear what you come up with.

See you tomorrow,

Jeremiah

P.S. I owe you an apology … Yesterday, I was scheduling my emails for this next week and I accidentally hit “publish now” instead of schedule … so you heard from me twice yesterday. I’m horribly embarrassed by my ineptitude … you’d think that as an email marketer with 28 years of experience, I would have figured out how to schedule something correctly by now. C'est la vie.

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There was no review queue, no editorial process, no post-facto revisions. I just wrote it and sent it … therefore, I can pretty much guarantee some sort of typo or grammatical error that would make all my past english teachers cringe.

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