Meta Is Reading Your Landing Page (Most Media Buyers Have No Idea)
Brad and Zach go deep on the single biggest scaling lever most media buyers are ignoring: the landing page. The spine of the episode is a mindset shift, meaning you can scale spend without new creative, new offers, or more discounting. You scale with pages.
They open with creative-to-lander congruency: the ad makes a promise and the page has to keep it. Zach shares how MarsMen now runs 33 active landing pages organized by roughly 10 messaging pillars (aging, cortisol, energy, weight loss, GLP-1, TRT vs. natural), and the company has a hard rule that no ad launches without a congruent page behind it. The reason goes beyond conversion rate: Meta's Andromeda algorithm is reading the landing page itself. Page copy is a targeting signal, not just a destination.
Brad backs this with a case study: a client sending all traffic to a PDP ($41K in spend) duplicated the exact same creative to a "5 Reasons Why" page. Same spend level, substantially better ROAS, lower CPMR, and the age breakdown showed 45+ ripping harder than ever. Same ad, new audience, unlocked entirely by the page.
From there they cover the format progression (listicle → advertorial → dynamic hybrid page → quiz), the specific page elements that matter (comparison charts, clear single CTA, social proof, FAQ, shoppable PDP sections injected below listicles), how to structure tests inside the ad account, kill criteria (48 hours at MarsMen's spend level, plus a "graveyard campaign" with cost controls to separate creative problems from page problems), what "winning" actually means (net new spend volume added to the account, not just beating the PDP head-to-head), and reporting (spend velocity as the success metric, heat maps, and session recordings, including one recording session that led to a single button change worth +20% revenue per session).
The episode closes with the getting-started playbook: don't reinvent the template. Go pull the landers from the biggest spenders in Motion or any ad-tracking tool and copy the structure, because they all run nearly the same one. The real bottleneck is copywriting, which is much harder than people think (raw AI output without heavy pre-prompting gets you "shit copy with a bunch of em dashes"), and perfectionism: your landing pages can be uglier than your website, and your ads can be uglier than your landing pages. Use your brand font and colors, but if it's not perfect, get started.
Key Takeaways
Did you know Meta's Andromeda algorithm is reading your landing page copy, not just your ad, and using it to decide who sees your ads?
How one brand took the exact same ad, swaped the PDP for a "5 Reasons Why" page, and matched $41K in spend at a substantially better ROAS while unlocking an entirely new age demo.
What if you could scale spend without a single new creative, new offer, or deeper discount, using only landing pages?
Why "my lander beat the PDP" is the wrong definition of a winning landing page test.
What watching just 20 session recordings revealed that a single button change fixed.
Why MarsMen refuses to launch any ad that doesn't have a congruent landing page behind it, and how they actively enforce it with 33 live landing pages.
Why nearly ALL nine-figure brands run the same landing page template, and why this one thing (and not design) is the real reason your pages take forever to ship.
Chapters
00:00 – Intro
02:42 – Creative and lander congruency: the ad makes a promise, the page has to keep it
04:20 – Mars's 33 landing pages and the "no ad without a congruent page" rule
06:48 – Organizing pages by pillar and how wide to go
09:04 – Case study: same creative, $41K PDP vs. 5 Reasons Why page (and the 45+ audience unlock)
11:27 – "Andromeda is reading the page, not just the ad"
12:52 – What CPMR is and why it's debatable as a metric
13:54 – The landing page format progression: listicle → advertorial → dynamic page → quiz
16:51 – The elements that actually move the needle on a listicle
20:48 – Testing individual page elements and the spend velocity you need to validate
23:46 – How pages get launched into the ad account (3 net new funnels a week)
26:44 – What a "win" actually is: adding net new spend volume
29:01 – Kill criteria: 48 hours and the graveyard campaign
30:08 – Persona-specific PDPs and injecting the PDP below the lander
32:32 – The Dr. Gundry VSL rabbit hole and why VSLs demand insane AOVs
34:29 – Using one open-ended quiz question to generate new creative pillars
37:23 – Landing page reporting: spend velocity, heat maps, and the recording that added 20% revenue per session
41:09 – How to get started: copy the top spenders' templates, copywriting is the real bottleneck, and "your landing pages can be uglier than your website"
This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It’s a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they’re offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com
Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com
Full Transcript
Meta Is Reading Your Landing Page (Most Media Buyers Have No Idea) - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyV31y0KQ74
Transcript:
(00:00) Can you hear my kids? Yeah, a little bit, but it's fine. It's not too bad. Well, that's until they start. Hold on. Let me do one more thing. It sounds like you live next to a park. It's distant, but... Is that any better? No, your voice is... No, just put it back. All right. I'm just going to try to throw it on mute.
(00:20) Hold on. Give me one second. It just starts screaming instantly. All right. Welcome back to another episode of the Scalability School podcast. Andrew is not with us. That sounds really dark. He's with us somewhere. He's busy right now. And so he left us to do intros. And this is what happens when you leave me to do intros.
(00:50) But we're excited to jump into some landing page stuff. I know I've been spending a lot of time talking about landing pages on this podcast. And basically, if you've talked to me about marketing in the last 60 days, it's something that I am talking about way too much. And today, we're going to dig into a bunch of specific insights and just kind of have a back and forth YAP session about things that we're seeing working, progression, how to test, what we'd like to see more of, how to do reporting, and a bunch of things in
(01:17) between. And so, yeah, it's going to be a little bit of a YAP session. I did, I will say, I'm about 30 minutes into your operators podcast. So, you know, you're big timing us. But no, it's cool, dude. Well, it gets worse. Don't listen. Don't listen much longer. I am for those, you know, the our 10, you know, 10s of singles of listeners that we have on skill building school.
(01:41) They were asking like this, like whatever, ask the same 10 questions at the end of every podcast. Like, what's one metric that's what's one metric that's like, overrated? And I said profit. And I immediately was, I was gassed. It was like after like, I had all day of calls. And I was like, yeah, it's because of cash flow.
(02:01) I was, it was the worst fucking answer I could have ever given. But you know what? Here, here we are. So I like reached out to Aaron. Can we take this out? He's like, it's already edited. I'm like, he's like, we could. And I'm like, I'm not an asshole. Just put it through. It's fine. Everyone will think I sound like decent.
(02:15) Then they're like, he doesn't want profit. What the fuck is that? So anyways, yeah, go listen to it. There's a big crossover of people who listen to this and that. Maybe, you know, so there's a, for sure. Like we, we probably have all the problem from that. Probably already listened to that by the time they listen to this.
(02:30) So for sure. Anyways, again, let's, let's get into it. So I think first, first topic, we've talked about this a bit. I think I mentioned it actually on that, on that episode, but creative, creative land of congruency. Do you want to like kick this off and then I'll, I'll add my, my perspective. Yeah. One of the, one of the biggest like frustrations that I see still, I spend a lot of time looking at ad accounts and libraries and I like watch an ad and it'll be like, help your dog sleep better at night.
(02:58) And then you click through to the page and it's like, okay, I landed on the PDP, which like might be fine, but there's literally nothing about sleep on the page. Like maybe a comparable for, for like hollow, like cause I know he always used hollow as an example. It's like, if you were talking about, um, hiking, uh, to somebody and then you send them to like a page that like was using images of the, like the compression socks has nothing to talk about with hunting.
(03:21) One more example. We were looking at a, uh, is like a bedding, bedding company. Uh, and they like their, one of the top performing ads was talking about like how it makes bedtime easier for me. Like kids making their bed was so much easier. And they're like, there's all the only pictures on the website are a bunch of old people making their bed.
(03:37) It's like, dude, where are the kids at brother? Um, so anyways, point on landing page congruency is like you're, you're telling, you're starting to tell a story in the ad. Um, and then if you're not continuing that story on the landing page, I think there's just a pretty big missed opportunity. And I think the recurring word of the year for us has been, and you said this a lot is like just intentionality and like being more thoughtful at every single step of the way.
(04:00) Um, and so creative and lander congruency is like the way that we're seeing this. Um, so now you guys are spending a lot of time thinking about that. And it's like, I think one of these last episodes, you said you didn't want to talk too much about it because it's, it's one of the things that's been, uh, unlocking stuff, but I think cats out of the bag.
(04:15) Um, so I don't know if you want to expand on things that you're seeing working and how you guys have been thinking about it. Yeah. So we built a report just recently. Um, and it's just, it's just landing page reporting, which I know we're going to talk about that year in a minute. But the, one of the things that I wanted to do is look at, so I'll, I'll talk about Mars, for example, on this one, Mars actively is running 33 landing pages, which is quite a few.
(04:39) And I think probably more than the average brand, but I think what we're starting to do well is we're, we're, we're matching. We are not going to launch an ad if it's going to talk about cortisol or if it's going to talk about, you know, uh, strength or willpower or whatever. If we do not have a landing page that also talks about that.
(04:57) So that's like a new thesis in the company that we won't do it, which like won't launch it. And then the creative strategist basically say, Hey, I don't feel like I have a landing page that's, that's congruent enough. Go, go make me one this week. So what's crazy about that is now I get to go look at all these ads that are running to these 33 different landing pages and actually see in my report that I built.
(05:19) Um, it's just like a quad generated report with a dropdown. What are the top spending ads to that landing page? And I can go figure out, is there concurrency happening or not? Cause there's something that's happening that this ad is getting more spend, which usually means, okay. So I mean, meta likes it or yes, performance is probably there.
(05:37) But like to your point about the sheets example, like if we're talking about cortisol in the ad and then we jump on a page and it's literally has nothing says it doesn't even say cortisol on it. Why are we running that, that ad to that, to that page? So that's been like really, really helpful. Um, I think that not a lot of people, like people look at landing page performance and then look at ad creative performance.
(05:59) They don't usually look at them like combined. And I think the cool thing about looking at it from a landing page, you are out first and then the ad creative that actually goes to it. You're able to actually reverse kind of into, is this, is it doing what it's supposed to do versus just looking at top ads and then just like seeing, it's just like, it's hard to kind of resonate.
(06:18) Is that matching the page or not? Um, I think it's easier to go the other way around. Yeah. And so you said 33 pages live and I'm sure we'll talk about maybe if we have enough time, we'll talk about like how we actually test, um, and how you think about testing. But those are like individually, you're not, it doesn't sound like you're using backend split testing tool to split them.
(06:36) Like they're all active URLs listed inside of meta. That's not really my question. My question is really more like, what is the limit to the quantity of pages and like how specific, you know, like, cause you can continue to go deeper and deeper and more narrow. Yeah. And so I guess like, how are you thinking about the width of the pages? So we break this down by pillar, just like we would with an ad creative.
(06:55) So we start with pillars. So we've got like, you know, aging, cortisol, energy, you know, weight loss. GLP one is like a huge category, you know, uh, TRT versus natural. Like these are all pillars. So you're going to start with the pillar. So like maybe we only have, we have 30 pages, but maybe at like 10, 10 ish pillars, right.
(07:15) To choose from. And then obviously dependent on the pillar. Like if we see traction, we'll have different pages. So like we might start with a listicle. This goes to the easiest one to start with. We might start with 10 reasons why. If we see a 10 reasons why it's working really well for an aging pillar and performance is there and spend is there.
(07:32) We're like finding some congruency of ads and like traction is there. And then we might go take it 10 reasons and punch it over to an advertorial. And then we'll maybe make a variant of the 10 reasons. That is like, you know, maybe the images go from in the 10 reasons goes from images to then gifts, or like maybe we go from 10 down to five.
(07:48) And then we add in a whole different comparison section grid to the page. That's kind of how we think about it is like, we start always with the listicle. We start before the listicle, even choosing that, that template. Start with like the pillar of the page that we're going to try and match the pillar of the ad creatives.
(08:05) Yeah. And then will you keep, will you keep the advertorial? Sorry. Okay. Will you keep the listicle, the quiz and the advertorial all live as long as they're still performing? So like same creative, just different landing pages with the match messaging? So the only way that we're doing the same actual ad creative to a different lander is to quiz.
(08:25) So if, if a page is working on the 10 reasons why we'll, we'll, we'll kind of like graduated up to the quiz. But outside of that, it'll always be a net new piece of ad creative that we'll try. Yeah. So no, we don't have any of like the duplicate stuff. We used to do more of that. We started to see like performance take a hit.
(08:43) So again, based on what Meta is telling us, like they, they see that as the same thing. So we were trying to actually build it out as something different, even though if the landing page is different, we're, we're, we're treating it as if it could be the only funnel that we're okay with it being the same exact creative is, is the quiz because it's such a different type of experience and funnel.
(09:03) So that's what we think about it. Yeah, that's cool. I have a, there's an example that the reason I asked that, um, is because I have an example. I, I tweeted this recently, so I'm just pulling it up. So I have the numbers in front of me, but we took, um, we had a client that was sending all their traffic to a PDP, but it was sending out all the traffic to the, to the PDP.
(09:20) So you can see that at the bottom there, but it spent the PDP, um, spent $41,000 and we duplicated that same piece of creative and sent it to a five reasons why page. And they ended up over that time period, at least spending the same amount of money, five reasons why, which has graduated to many other things since then, um, like spent the same amount, but perform substantially more efficiently.
(09:39) And then everybody's obsessed with CPMR. So I kind of made a meme out of that and just saying like CPMR was also lower, um, for this, but like, those are the same ads. And what was interesting about that, as I found it, I was looking at the delivery of the different, what is the, what is the delivery difference between the two of these specifically the age breakdown.
(09:58) And if you look at the age breakdown for the PDP, it was like 45 and up pretty clearly. Um, and that was one of the insights that landed on the page. So like the headline says, X reasons why women 45 and up are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, I was looking at the breakdown again for the five reasons why and how that changed.
(10:14) So really the only thing that changed is that all of a sudden 45 and up started to rip even more. So 45 and up was spending more. It was more efficient, but the 55 and up was still good. It just didn't get any more spend proportionally. Um, and 65 and up was also still really good. Just getting, and it didn't get any more spend proportionally, but it was the same ad.
(10:33) So there's a couple of points in there, um, that I'm just kind of like yapping through. The first is that we find that having multiple pages live has been interesting because it meets people at different points of where they're at. Like to your point, quiz is maybe, Hey, I'm a little less aware of what's going on.
(10:47) Um, I'm not sure if you'd agree with that, but like, it's a little more top of funnel in the way that people traditionally talk about it. Listicles may be somewhere in the middle, depending on the positioning. And then PDP is like, obviously as, as close as you can probably get without sending people directly to checkout, which I've seen some ad accounts that try to do that.
(11:04) And then the other point is like, okay, well, there's an interesting progression on that, on that five reasons why page and those insights, which is, okay, we've got this messaging on this page that says 45 and up. What if we just duplicate the headline and go 55 and up and still leave the same ad live? How would that change things? A lot of philosophy around like how fragmented the ad account starts to get.
(11:22) Um, but the whole, I said something on a call, um, recently that like seemed to make it clear to people, but like Andromeda is reading the page, not just the ad. And that was, that was, that was interesting for me to see because now, yes, Meta thinks that the creative is the same, but it's very clearly different delivery.
(11:39) Um, so you're thinking about that whole funnel as, as the ad really. You said a couple of things there that I think are super interesting that I'm personally gonna like take and break down, which is like the age breakdown by landing page performance. That's something that I haven't thought about in a while. I look at it by creative, um, but I don't look at it by Lander.
(11:56) So that's, that'll be fascinating to dig into. And then I've never looked at CPMR by Lander. Yeah. Like destination URL. So that just another one to be like, I wonder what that does. And if some landing pages, which I think would make sense inherently have a better CPMR. So two good call-outs there for sure. Yeah.
(12:14) And that, that was, that was the thing that was so interesting about that is, I mean, I mean, CPMR to me, I'm still the cat, uh, the, the, I don't, I don't know if I've like fully come around to that as like a useful metric yet. I think it's interesting. Um, but like ROAS was substantially better and then we could spend more behind it.
(12:32) So it's like, I didn't need the CPMR signal to tell me that. Um, and I'm sure we'll get into how we test things. Um, but like, it was very clear that that just like consumed all the spend. So, um, we still find success sending the same creative to, to, um, different landing pages because you actually do unlock a different audience as we saw in, in that age, uh, breakdown.
(12:49) Brad, I'm sure people that are listening to this probably know what CPMR is, but do you want to explain what that is? Cause we've said it like five times, but. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, generally people look at, um, CPM. So cost per 1000 impressions. CPMR is basically just the reach version of that. So pressure impressions are non-unique.
(13:06) Reach is a unique impression. So, um, it's just the amount that you spend to reach 1000 unique people. The one of the reasons I don't like it is like inherently just goes down over time. Like it, the second you spend $1 on meta, your next piece of reach, like it just inherently goes down. There's only so many people you can reach in the world.
(13:23) And if you narrow it down to the U S and then you narrow it down to your target market, you just, you just run out of people. And you, you kind of alluded to this earlier. And it's one of the things you talked about in the, in the operators episodes, which is like, you think about starting a product that just has so many fricking angles that you can unlock because that's how you can open up.
(13:38) I mean, TAM is one way to think about this, but like specific angles is how you can say different things to different people. But yeah, CPMR is, um, cost per 1000 unique reached people. Sweet. Yeah. So you, you kind of, you were talking about the progression of landing pages and the types of landing pages. Um, I don't know if you want to speak to, um, you said you start with listicles and then go into some of those other things.
(14:00) Um, is there like a certain progression that you go to a certain reason why you start with listicles? Um, maybe just talk about the formats or a second. Yeah. I mean, it's just ease, right? So once you have a light, a 10 reasons why template for the most part, if you go look at any big nine figure brands, like they all run pretty much the same template.
(14:17) So the nice thing about it is it requires copy and it requires like static, static image design for, for, for the graphics. So I think just for, you know, ease of speed, it's, it's the best. Um, and I think it's, again, it's such a simple concept of like, here's 10 reasons why here's five reasons why it just, it's inherently how people think about things.
(14:39) Um, they just like lists. So that that's usually where we start from there. Then obviously getting advertorials to work. I used to be like a advertorials will never work. I think I've said this on this podcast. We've started to get them to work. And I think it just has to do with copywriting. Like it has to have the right ad creative that, you know, usually is a bit more top of funnel and it then can do, you know, if, if the creative then kind of answers the, the, it closes the loop of what the creative might, might produce.
(15:08) You know, people talk about native ads, which is like, you know, it looks like a phone from your, or a photo from like your parents phone, like that, that they just accidentally took almost like, that's the piece of creative, you know, like something sitting on a counter. It's like shitty lighting, interesting, and just kind of, you know, like, what is this? That's the whole concept of like a proper native ad or native creative.
(15:29) And so when those images that just kind of prompts, you know, curiosity to then an advertorial style page, or then it might be more of a story that you're telling, uh, I think can work well, but it's just harder to do. So start with 10 reasons, then go down that kind of rabbit hole of, of advertorial. And then we might just do like kind of its own unique blend, which is like different sections.
(15:50) You know, there might be, uh, kind of like a mini 10 reasons why built within the page. Then there might be a us versus them. And then there might be, you know, uh, an FAQ section. There might be all sorts of like these kind of unique things, a longer story. Maybe there's like a founder story section in it. That's kind of like the third one.
(16:08) And then the fourth, which is quiz, which I think, you know, there's a couple of people on Twitter that talk about quizzes all the time. I mean, they are underrated. I think like, I think, you know, the problem is people seem like it's going to be like super hard to build. They're not really hard to build. There's a, there's a tool called Hayflow, which is what we used for the beginning of Marsmen.
(16:26) We've now built the tool internally. Our head of e-com built it and clawed and then self-deployed it, which is sick. Um, so we can do a lot more kind of custom stuff with it, but Hayflow is great. Like if you're wanting to try to build a quiz, like just go study again, top brands. Most of them build them very similarly.
(16:41) So this is another great entry point. So it's kind of like listicle, advertorial, dynamic page, and then quiz is kind of a whole other one. So that's how we think about it. Yeah. And within the, so like going back to listicles for a second, um, at some point, I'm sure you started with a three reasons or a five reasons and then a seven and then a 10.
(17:00) Um, so there's like a progression that you've gone through where you started, Hey, we started with a five and then we went to 10 and it made a big difference. And then we added, I mean, I've the amount of times I go into an ad library, I click the landing page and it's like, Oh, this looks like Marsman's landing page is like astounding.
(17:17) Um, but like there's comparison charts at the top or somewhere on the bottom. I know Primal Queen probably, I think Primal Queen was one of the original people to add like the timeline to it. Um, so it's like, what are those, what are the elements to a listicle that you've seen really make a difference? Yeah. I mean, the comparison chart is, is a no brainer.
(17:33) That one. And then just like a super clear final CTA section. Um, and then usually like some type of social proof, usually above that. So it goes like comparison chart, 10 reasons, either FAQ or social proof section of just like review style content, um, or like a story from a customer. And that is like super clear.
(17:56) This is the only CTA on the page to move you over to a PDP. That's usually it. And again, like, I think I might've mentioned this in the last, on the last episode, but like now we're testing, like taking the PDP and injecting it below. So not even like that CTA section. So I think we'll see more people inherently copy that.
(18:12) Uh, if it's, if it's, you know, I don't know if that was us really doing that for the most part, but if you go look at our pages, there's a lot of, a lot of shoppable versions of PDPs below listicles and stuff like that now that we run. So yeah, I mean, I think, I think that's mostly it. I, you know, candidly, these ideas aren't, aren't always us or mine.
(18:29) Like, you know, the OG goats of, of DTC and direct response were like Javi and Blissey. You know, those are the two I got to meet the founders and get to become good friends with them. And, you know, inherently ended up copying some of their ideas or talk to them about concepts. But like the five reasons why originally it was because Blissey was doing it.
(18:46) And then they wrote that like six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12, 15 reasons why. And like, they just kept adding more and kept seeing better performance and we didn't ratchet up to 15 or anything like that yet. But yeah, the Vahe and the team over at Blissey, just absolute goats with, with that. And then I think the Javi team were the ones that were figuring out some of these unique elements to add into these pages, just to add a little more sauce to them.
(19:09) And maybe it would answer like a little more context, which is usually what you're looking to do. It's just like, what is the missing context of this page that they would, it would be great for the customer to know before they see the price. All right, friends, quick break. This episode is brought to you by Northbeam, the marketing attribution platform that we love over here at the pod.
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(20:48) Yeah, there's that's like that's such an interesting like place that I think we've kind of talked about this really briefly where like that's where like you can probably innovate quite a bit is like, OK, I know what I'm trying to answer. Like I know what a comparison chart answers. It shows very quickly how you stack up against other things that people are considering.
(21:08) Is there a different way you can communicate that other than a comparison chart or like people want to know what the product is going to do for them? Like what does the transformation look like before and after as a way of showing that transformation? But that timeline that I mentioned Primal Queen and I know a lot of other people have something like it, but like that timeline also kind of paints the picture of here's what you can expect and here's the transformation you can expect along these kind of timelines.
(21:32) I just it's such an interesting place because like that's where you can actually innovate. But that's also where it's very difficult because you have to figure out like what is the actual format and what is that section? How does it get delivered? I don't know if you've thought about like unique ways to deliver those those elements, but that's something that that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about.
(21:51) So I have two more two more follow up questions to that. The first thing is you kind of mentioned in the notes on something you wish you had more insight into, which was like what elements that we just talked about, like how they drive impact. How are you thinking about that? Like I think heat map might be a tool that kind of tries to map sections more specifically to revenue.
(22:11) I'm not sure exactly how they do it, but how are you thinking about that? I think that's just that you'd be testing pages. It's like the page with the element, the page without the element. I think that's really all you can do. And the issue is like you just need the velocity to actually like do that. I think people you're probably better off most brands that are, you know, are spending less than seven figures a month on ads.
(22:31) It's just like testing a whole new page versus like, hey, I add one new section. Is that going to get the lift? Like if you don't have enough velocity, like the test is going to have to run for months to technically validate. So you can obviously take the first couple of days or hours of performance on IntelliGems, however you want, and send it, which I've done in the past.
(22:51) And things have generally worked out for us. So sure. But that's how we, that's how we do it. It's just like design the whole new section, usually test it against the highest spend or highest traffic volume lander, and then run those side by side where it's just like we add one new section into the page. Did it add any performance or not? And then it's just a URL, URL change.
(23:12) I do have, I don't know, this is a tin hat theory. I do have a weird, there's something in my brain that says that meta doesn't like AB tests on the backend of URLs. I don't know what, but I think it's, I think it's the fact that, you know, Intromete is scraping the content on the page and it's seen a load happen or it's seen some JavaScript happen where it's like, I don't like this as much.
(23:33) Who knows? Maybe it just gives you like a, you know, you have a hundred points score and it takes one away of those hundred. Like maybe it's something, but I just have a weird feeling that it has an issue. No proof of that, but it's just something I think about. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, is it confusing? Is it confusing signal for the reasons you just mentioned? Because the way that it loads, but also like if a different type of person is resonating with that page, but it's technically the same ad creative, like it's different if they
(23:59) were two different pieces of, of like actually two different ads in the ad account, but like it's actually delivering based on how that ad is responding. So like, is it sending confusing signal back because different types of people are, you know, responding to them in different ways. You know, my tinfoil hat is, is, uh, is with you on that.
(24:16) So I get it. That, that leads into something interesting. Um, so I'm skipping, I'm skipping ahead a little bit with this one, which is how you think about actually testing the pages. Like how do they get into the ad account? And like, you know, are you, when do you decide to actually use an IntelliGems on the backend versus not? Yeah.
(24:34) Usually it's just content swaps now for the most part. Like we're just, we're, we're, we're adding a new element or we're adding potentially like a whole different, like a 10 reasons why listicle that pushes you to the PDP versus a 10 reasons why listicle that, that has the buy box or the whole PDP below it. That's when we're using IntelliGems where we're taking kind of swings like that or we're launching things.
(24:54) I mean, again, with the creative volume you have with, with the spend volume, you have the ability to test more. So I'm in a little bit of a unique scenario there. We're just because we just have to launch so much shit every week to keep up because just so many things burn out. So we're launching like realistically, probably three net new landing page funnels a week.
(25:16) I'd say around that number feels right. For Mars, I'd say we're a bit, a bit less than that for hollow, maybe one to two a week for hollow net new landers. And yeah, we just launch them like we normally would. So it's like, depending on the products, it will go on a different campaign. And then, or depending on the funnel, it'll go on a different campaign.
(25:34) If we have them broken out by pillar, not sometimes we do that, sometimes we don't. And then it'll just go into its own ad set with its own budget, just like it normally would with like a creative test. Yeah. We've, we've played around a lot with like with it when it's a net new page. So like we like to build around, like start with the ad as the insight.
(25:53) It's like, okay, what can we, what can we build off of this? And how do we make a page based on this? And usually it's like, can you actually build it from one specific ad? Now, you know, obviously if you can look at the entirety of your ad account and say to the pillar point that you're making, if there's a bunch of different things that could benefit from a more specific page, great.
(26:09) We've, we've been rolling out landing page tests. We'll start with like an ad, right? So the one I referenced earlier in the tweet that I was talking about, that was built off of one founder ad that had some very specific insights about the delivery of that ad. What that specific ad was saying, we just duplicated it in within the same campaign, same ad set, and just let meta dictate the spend between it.
(26:29) And that landing page literally, literally the next day was spending more than the PDP and continue to scale well in excess of it. But we've also had other wins where like we've winning to me with landing pages is not just it spends more or performs better or is more efficient than the other page. It's like, can you add net new spend volume to the ad account? So an example of this recently is if we had, we had, if I'm using my hands to describe this, it's like you have a, if your spend volume is 100%, your current funnel is set up to get
(27:00) you 100% to spend or whatever you spent, maybe I should use a dollar amount. You're spending 5k a day on this funnel and you launch a lander, you have, you have your PDP is spending 5k a day. You launch a lander and it adds 1k a day. As long as it goes up to 6k a day and spend and adds that new volume to me, that's a win because you're, you're, again, you're kind of meeting different people where they're at.
(27:19) Like that, that's a win. It's not about just like getting, getting an excess. And that's why I like duplicating the existing ads and letting them, letting meta dictate the spend between them because it shifts over time. Like I was looking at an ad account the other day where it's like, we launched a quiz, it took over, then it fell back.
(27:35) Then I take it over again. Like it just keeps going in and out depending on the season. Now, I don't know if there's like an actual seasonal reason for the change, but it's just ads, the landing pages and how they perform shifts over time. So as much as possible, I try to like leave things on, but I'm also the, I'm also a little bit of a CBO leave things on Maxie.
(27:53) So yeah, that's probably part of it. I think you're right for the most part. I think we're just a little extra critical of, because we have so much volume of creative going in. It's like, okay, if we're, if we're, if we have to launch this to validate the creative, we might as well try to match the page to it versus just like duping it again and trying it to go to another one that might not be as congruent.
(28:13) So I think generally you're right in thinking that way. And the whole idea of adding incremental spend is the goal at the end of the day. I mean, like, yeah, you might get a landing page of five reasons that outperforms your PDP. If you have a set monthly budget that you can spend into because of inventory constraints or whatever, sure.
(28:27) Great. Huge win to get incremental, you know, raw as lift. But the whole idea of this is building new funnels. So you get more scale. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we do it. If you, yeah, if you're, if you're going to try to launch, you, you make, um, you're, you're looking at your, your pillar and you're trying, it's like, okay, we got one piece of creative.
(28:44) Now we need to launch it to the three different variants of landing pages that we have live. Like all of a sudden you have, you know, you have to analyze performance on that, that same piece of creative, those landing pages. And it's a, I mean, it's a lot, a lot of work on top of the fact, like, is there actually marginal benefit in that? You know, debatable.
(28:59) Yeah. I would agree. Yeah. How long are you letting things rip then? Like how, what is, what is your actual test and your patience for those? What does this test look like? Yeah. It changes. It changes all the time. I feel like sometimes we, we are more patient. Sometimes we're not. I think, I think at the spend threshold that Mars is at specifically now, things are just burning out so quickly that we, we turn them off fairly quick.
(29:21) So like, I mean, if we're not seeing the numbers that we want in like 48 hours, like we're usually killing that, that ad. Um, and when it comes to landing pages, it's like we, if this is something that we've done, if the ad does work or doesn't work, we'll duplicate it over to a different funnel for us. It might be quiz or PDP and then we'll launch it in a, what we like the graveyard concepts, graveyard campaign, um, with a cost control and see if then that works.
(29:47) Cause it's like, was it actually the creative problem or was the landing page problem that it was going to? So we do that a lot if, if like the soft metrics on the creative looks good, but the performance of shit. So that is like the other way that we think about it. We're pretty hot to kill things, but it doesn't mean we're not going to do that and throw it in the cost control campaign and see if we can get some more steel out of it.
(30:06) Um, going to a different page. Yeah. And then I'm, I think going this, this rolls nicely into reporting, but before we do that, um, Jordan and I, George, my business partner, uh, for those that don't know, um, we've been, we've been like flirting with this idea of like the persona specific PDP, um, because PDPs can still work really well.
(30:28) And I know, um, I've talked to a bunch of people in the space and like just expanding your PDP and giving more information that answers questions and customizing your product photos to, um, you know, I, I know you, you gave that insight and then all of a sudden, like last year and now everybody's product page, their carousel has a bunch of images that are dialed in a certain way.
(30:46) Like, have you, have you flirted with the idea of just like making the product page a little bit more persona specific? Like, okay, we just changed the product title to match. It's like, I mean, you, you've, the extreme version of this with hollow is like compression works. So we made fucking impression socks.
(31:00) Yeah. Yeah. It's like, right. Right. So you just do go the product route, but right. No, this is exactly, this is the next level of where we're at now for more. So it's like, we've taken the ad to landing page congruency. We've got that. Now we move, now we move the PDP to the bottom of the page. Does that perform better than pushing the PDP? Let's say it does.
(31:21) Now it's much easier to edit that quote unquote PDP section if it's all one long funnel. And I think this is the one that was really interesting. I would, I used to look at, at brands like, um, even grooms a little bit, but, um, primal queen. I'm like, these pages are so long. How do, how do that many customers get through this whole page? I think if, if, if the content is right and it's relevant, I don't think the length of the page is actually going to hurt to a certain degree.
(31:47) It's not going to hurt general conversion rate if it's congruent. If you're talking about weight loss and then you go to a page and it's 10 reasons why this product is going to help with weight loss this season, dah, dah, dah, dah, 10 reasons. Great. And then you get into a product page section and it's like the weight, the best weight loss products.
(32:04) Here's your discount. Da, da, da. Right. I think, and then all the carousel images match. Why would that not do better? So that's where we're at now where we are starting to, to, to tinker with actual clinical PDP because obviously we're signal SKU, which helps us do that much easier than if you're, you know, 10,000 SKU apparel company.
(32:23) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you've got people that are like, they want to solve a problem so badly, you've got them captivated. Like they're going to continue to read until you give them the solution. I think, I think I told you guys separately. I saw this insane ad from Dr. Gundry, which I think is golden hippo. It's a golden hippo brand.
(32:38) If I'm not mistaken. Yeah. I think so. Dude, like I clicked the ad on, on Twitter. Cause I was like, this is going to be insane. And I clicked it. And the only, like, it's a five minute VSL and you have to watch it. It's actually more than five minutes. I'm pretty sure. You have to watch the video. You can't do anything else on the page, but watch the video.
(32:52) And at some point I couldn't even wait that long. I literally tried to leave my phone. I was like, I can't wait anymore. I was like, abandoned the page. It was like, you have to watch the whole thing and then get to the point. Now, I'm not trying to get sued by anybody by saying crazy things, but like they're promising some pretty insane things.
(33:06) And so like the person who's watching that is like desperate for a solution. And so like, they're going to watch the whole thing. And like, you know, people talk about like levels of interest. Like there's people who sit down and watch a three hour podcast and like, it's cause they're interested in it. Like they'll sit through the whole thing and they'll stop when they don't want to read it anymore.
(33:22) That's the interesting thing about pages is you can just like, yeah, progressively build, build more and more as long as it's not like killing your page load speed and all that good stuff. So yeah. Yeah. We've tried VSL's failed. I think we'll try it again. I think we'll try it again, but we, we didn't crack it the first go at it.
(33:39) So it's something interesting that my lessons from the VSL, like going down the rabbit hole is you just, you basically just push up an insane AOV. That's the whole entire. So it's like, you can get someone to watch 45 minutes of a video before you finally present the solution as this magical capsule. You need them because you've had so much drop off throughout that.
(33:59) You need that customer to buy this insane AOV bundle, which is usually just like a bunch of crazy post-purchase upsells, like stacked after another. So, and unless you can do that, like the, the full blown VSL situation just doesn't make a ton of sense, which is kind of why we killed it to some degree. Yeah. Is there anything related to, I know I still want to hit on reporting.
(34:19) Is there anything related to like merchandising offers, how it shows up in the product page post-purchase that like you think is worth hammering through really quick? I can't think of anything off the top of my head. We, we did some questions post-purchase around here. Here's one that's interesting. In our quiz, we ask a really interesting question as like one of them.
(34:40) I won't say necessarily which one because I don't want everyone to steal and shit, but we ask an interesting question in the quiz. And that question has given me so many ideas for new pillars because we leave it like we kind of leave it open-ended. There's, there's actual prompts, but like it's open-ended enough the way that we let them fill it out that I think it's, it's been really interesting.
(35:00) So I would say like, if you feel like you're getting stuck with, Hey, I don't know what pillars to go build for creative or even for landers, build a quiz and ask a question that like prompts these people that don't know much about your brand or your product yet to like give you some feedback and you might come up with something really interesting.
(35:17) So that's one that's been, I'll just say is like a teaser of something that's been generating interesting ideas for me and coming up with new, new concepts for, for new pillars. Yeah. Does your quiz builder, I know you use something else and you guys recently switched. Does it tell you like, are you guys paying attention to who ends up buying and how they answer the questions and then using that information? Cause like you can get, like you have the quiz answers in aggregate, but like the most useful ones are the people that ended up buying.
(35:44) Right. And obviously you can see where drop-off looks like and things like that. But if you, cause like post-purchases, it's also a very different experience. Like this person also bought, they self-selected and they're kind of, they may be answering it different than pre-purchase. So it was like, there's almost value in understanding what the people who didn't buy said.
(36:00) And then also, okay, the people who did buy, how did they answer these, these questions and just filtering it by purchaser actually. Don't have that data, but we're going to figure that out. Cause that's super interesting. That's super interesting. Yeah. I mostly look at like. It's a little bit from both. Yeah. I mean, right now I'm kind of going down the rabbit hole of like hacking the drop-off rate.
(36:19) I'm looking at like drop-off by question and I'm like, okay, what can I change this, this slide or question to be so I can keep the progression, progression happening. That's mostly where my time is spent right now in the quiz. It's just like thinking about those drop-off rates and figuring out what about that question or what about the answers that, that they have as options to select or slowing them down or making them bored and saying, this is too many questions.
(36:45) But yeah, that would be pretty, that'd be pretty important information to get. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've seen some insanely long quizzes. I'm always surprised by like, I don't know, this idea of friction, like people, people, I feel like people are really coming around to thinking that like friction is not necessarily a bad thing.
(37:00) Especially with quizzes. Cause like quizzes are like starting to self-select. Maybe it's the open loop concept. I said that on a call today. It was super cringy. Um, it's like the open loop of like, okay, I want the answer. I got started this. I want to know what it's going to tell me. I want to know what the answer is.
(37:13) I want this like miracle thing that I could take to solve all my problems. Um, but yeah, uh, well, they'll have to tell me how that goes. Cause now I'm, now I'm invested. Yeah. Okay. Uh, that rolls really nicely into like landing page reporting and how you're thinking about, um, reporting. You kind of talked about the reports that you just built out that you, you found really interesting.
(37:32) Um, I'll just really quickly say a couple of things that I pay attention to from a, landing page reporting perspective. And then I know there's a lot more that I would like to dig further into, but, um, because of the way that we launched tests in CBO, spend velocity is like aggregate spend for that funnel, um, or that product or that campaign is one thing.
(37:52) Spend velocity is another thing. And then once we start to see some validation, that's where I'm going and I'm looking at the heat maps and I'm saying, okay, this is how far people are making down the page. Here's what people are clicking most often. And I'll give one specific tactical thing that came out. Like you should watch, you should watch recordings.
(38:07) It's really helpful to watch recordings. We ran a quiz funnel on time and I started watching recordings. I watched fucking 20 in a row. Nobody took the quiz. It's like, it's working and it was converting insanely well. Nobody was taking the quiz. Literally nobody. We added a shop the product button. It said, start the quiz or shop the product right below it.
(38:28) Uh, that literally revenue per session went up, uh, 20% by just adding that. Cause like, and if you don't want to take the quiz, cool, you can go to the product page and check it out. Um, and then the people that want to take the quiz, great. Like that was, so, um, I watched the recordings and that's kind of like, uh, the recordings are tricky cause, um, small samples and it's, you know, um, easy to get distracted by that.
(38:46) But, um, total spend, spend velocity are kind of some core things that I pay attention to. Um, what else are you looking at as you're evaluating landing page reporting? Yeah. I mean, the biggest one is the creative that's going to that landing page. I kind of talked about it earlier. It's like, start with the landing page URL, see how performance is.
(39:04) Is it, is it beating baseline versus the rest of the account? What does the spend volume versus the rest of the account? Which then gives you some indication of like, okay, maybe there's some ability for the raws to be slightly lower on that. If they're, if you're getting more scale out of it. And then what are the actual ads that are performing for that later? That is the main thing I'm paying attention to right now.
(39:23) Um, I think like the content on the page, watching screen recordings, watching heat maps or like looking at heat maps or click maps. I think that's like the next level. Um, but because we're launching so many new ones and we're trying to build this concurrency thing, I'm mostly just trying to figure out like, what are the ads are actually working within this later? Which are the ones that are not, that are getting a bunch of spend that we, that are kind of like failing at that combination of concurrency.
(39:48) So that's mostly it. I don't really have anything else. Super, super special. We, we built like this thing that kind of shows them on like a chart format. So I can watch landers like, uh, scale or, or fall off throughout periods of time. And then also this like scatterplot kind of version, which then breaks it out by like, um, spend and then ROAS.
(40:06) So it's like, you can kind of figure out like, okay, the ROAS kind of degrades, but then some of these like landers have a lot more scale to them. So it's easier to kind of identify those winners. Again, nothing too crazy. Um, mostly just like the, that combo of what ad is actually not working for this very specific lander.
(40:26) Um, yeah. Well, it feels like getting into like metrics, like bounce rate and obviously like revenue procession, profit procession, conversion rate, those things are like helpful, but it's like, you need a, you need a success metric first, which is maybe total spend, spend velocity, actual efficiency. It's like, that's gonna be way more insightful than looking at a bounce rate.
(40:43) Well, it's like bounce rate might not actually tell you anything like, you know, the, when the test that I talked about earlier, um, going from a PDP to a listicle bounce rate dropped a lot, which was, that's a helpful insight, but like it also just performed better. I didn't need bounce rate to tell me that it's like, okay, people are spending more time reading the content on the page.
(41:00) Great. Um, you know, but it's bounce rate that like, what is bounce rate going to tell me that, um, that spend velocity didn't, um, is, uh, is something that I've been thinking a lot about. Like if you, if you're doing nothing, like you're, you're, you're listening to this and you're like, I bought it. Like, yes, sign me up.
(41:15) I would love to test landing pages. How do I do it? Um, I think it's kind of daunting. Um, I know like AI is making it progressively less daunting to get pages rolled out, which is great. But is there any place that you would suggest people go to start? And a caveat to that is like, why, why do you think it takes most brands forever to build and test and deploy a landing page? Like our CRO agency is just like super slow.
(41:37) Um, are they like, what, what's yeah. Um, how would you start? What's preventing people from just like launching pages? The answer is like, it's not that hard anymore, but you do need to do, you need to put all the pieces together correctly, which is the template has to be correct. And it needs to be like a winning template.
(41:53) What would I do there? Go look at in motion in any of your favorite tools, go look at the brands that are spending the most, any trend track, any, any of these tools that can like scrape things, go find the brands that are spending the most that are pushing traffic. Most of them have the same looking templates for the most part, especially for listicles.
(42:10) Just copy that, like start there, copy that template. So many people have copied ours already, right? Hollow, Marsman, it's whatever. It is what it is. Template, I don't really care about. Copy it away. Then really what it comes down to is just copywriting and copywriting and then the images that go with the pages.
(42:27) I think the copywriting is the hardest part. I think writing good copy is much harder than people make it out to be. Throwing it into quad without a ton of pre-prompting is going to get you shit copy with a bunch of M dashes. And like, I think people see into that now. So I think doing copyright is hard. And I think that's probably like the biggest thing that slows things down.
(42:49) And then if a brand is very brand forward, they want everything like designed to match brand standard. That's another thing that can slow shit down. So I think the one thing that I always say is like your landing pages can definitely be uglier than your website and your ads can be even uglier than your landing pages.
(43:03) So like be okay with a little bit of like, yeah, use your brand font, use your brand colors, use those things. But like if it's not perfect, get started.
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