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🔌 Breaking News: Meta Ad Spend Disaster 🤦‍♂️

🔌 Breaking News: Meta Ad Spend Disaster 🤦‍♂️

The Marketing Plug #9

George Mack
April 24, 2023

Hello!

It’s George here. Return of the Chief Plug Officer.

Ready to get plugged in?

Here’s the 0.1% of marketing information today:

🔌 Breaking News: Meta Ad Spend Disaster 🤦‍♂️
🔌 How To Fix Your Leaky Funnel 🛒
🔌 Vanity & Subscriptions Model That Scales To $50M 📈

🔌 Breaking News: Meta Ad Spend Disaster 🤦‍♂️

In my 10 years of marketing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mess up like this before.

Here’s what happened:

Sunday night at 1am PT, Meta ad accounts started spending like crazy.
So many horror stories are being reported: Ad accounts spending the whole budget by 9 am — or CPM’s going up by 2-10x.
Most marketers were asleep or off on a Sunday. So some only noticed when they woke up, and most are only realizing this morning.
Jake the Ad Nerd reported $50K spent by 8am — and 0 traffic!

This is the most egregious I've ever seen. Some in our portfolio hit $50k by 8am PST with absolutely ZERO traffic driven. Our limit rules were even disregarded. Everything from startup to legacy brands completely overspent. Working with reps now but still no definitive answer.
— Jake the Ad Nerd (@jaketheadnerd)
3:28 PM • Apr 23, 2023

🔌 Plug Take:

1. Check ASAP - Run through every ad account you have access to. Make sure you check the CPM spikes.

2. Contact Meta Reps - Show them the damage that has occurred. Expect slow replies.

3. Be hyper-vigilant - Monitor accounts closely over the next 7 days. There will be some 2nd / 3rd order consequences as Meta and advertisers figure this situation out.

We will wait until the facts come out — but this is an interesting correlation (it might not be causation though)

Meta laid off 4,000 employees from the tech department this week
Someone definitely pulled the plug on their way out 🫠
— Mirella Crespi (@mirellacrespi)
9:01 PM • Apr 23, 2023

🔌 How To Fix Your Leaky Funnel 🛒

Do you have a leaky funnel?

Some great data from 2PM on why customers abandon carts.

🔌 Plug Take:

1. One-click checkout on product pages - Did you know Amazon had a patent on the 1-click checkout from 1999 to 2017?

Crazy.

Reduce as much pain as you can for customers to check out.

Make sure you have Apple and Android Pay on your product pages.

Stripe payment link pages are converting so high because of this right now.

2. Time your checkout process - Get out your stopwatch.

Time how long it takes you to go from arrival to key action.

Every week ask your team: “How can we reduce this by 20%?”

3. Avoid the desktop blind spot - 95% of founders and marketing teams I know spend lots of time analyzing their websites on a desktop.

Meanwhile, the majority of their traffic is MOBILE.

There’s a blind spot that exists because marketing teams work on their laptops.

Always. Check. Mobile. First.

4. Stack as many positive psych points as you can

Positive psych points = Great copy, easy UX, amazing offer

Negative psych points = Data collecting, card details, shipping

Look to increase positive psych points and reduce negative psych points as much as you can.