PDP Landers and Meta Creative - Ideas We Wish We Tested Sooner

May 22

In this inaugural episode of the Scalability School Podcast, hosts Andrew Foxwell, Zach Stuck and Brad Ploch walk through six high‑impact tests they wish they’d tried much sooner—each backed by real‑world data and actionable takeaways.

What if the secret to a 20% conversion lift isn’t new ad creative, but turning your PDP’s most‑clicked images into a swipe-able carousel?
Can swapping polished ads for raw, unedited customer review screenshots unlock ten‑times more ad spend and engagement?
How much more trust could you build by embedding real Facebook comment screenshots—complete with their native UI—right on your landing pages?
How you can lean on Meta to re‑activate lapsed buyers with a one‑day click window and aggressive MinROAS targets, When email and SMS campaigns stall.
Uncovering new audiences by running cost‑cap and value‑based bidding side by side, then scaling winners into large ASC budgets.
Is cranking out over 1,000 ad assets in a month be the safety net your performance needs?

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community

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Full Transcript

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Andrew Foxwell: all right. Welcome to the 1st episode of scalability school. We're so excited that you're here 1st of all. Thank you for listening. Everybody. My name is Andrew Foxwell, and here we've got Brad and Zach. Guys introduce yourselves.

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Zach Stuck: Brad, I'll let you go first.st

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Brad Ploch: Cool. Yeah, I'm Brad. I'm the owner of work marketing and also own an E-com brand on the side. I've been doing digital. Marketing my entire professional career on the agency for about 6 years. Been on the brand side for almost a full year now. And yeah, excited to dig into this with, you guys.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah. Likewise, Zach stuck. I am the founder of Homestead, a growth marketing agency that's been in business for about 5 years, and then the founder and CEO of Easy street brands, which is now the portfolio brands that I oversee, one of them being hollow, which is the main brand in the portfolio. Right now.

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Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, well, we're excited to have all of you. And my name is Andrew Foxwell. I run the Foxwell Founders Community a group of 540 digital marketers from 30 countries around the world that are arguably the best group of digital marketers that exist spend an average of about 400 million a month just on Meta, all of us together, and Zach and Brad are both in that group. So we're excited to have all of you here today listening to this 1st episode where we're hoping to drop value, we're definitely going to continue to bring guests on this podcast

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Andrew Foxwell: we're going to ensure that you walk away from each of these podcasts with

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Andrew Foxwell: actionable things that you can take and steal and like do in your business immediately. That's the whole idea. That's the whole idea is to give you actionable non fluff tactics that can improve your business right away. So

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Andrew Foxwell: that's really the whole hypothesis. So let's go ahead and get into it right out of the right, out of the gates. So number one, we have Cro and Pdp image optimization. Zach, let's get into this brands kind of over focusing on ad creative and overlook pdps. Right? So what's the tactic here that you want to share.

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Zach Stuck: So this is one that we've been running more

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Zach Stuck: frequently and more recently with our all of our brands across the portfolio. But the thesis is, we started looking into heat maps and click maps on our, on our websites and specifically on our product pages, we were trying to figure out, okay, if we are going to improve conversion, you know conversion rate on each of these pages. What is the things that we need to be.

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Zach Stuck: you know, focusing on what are the things that customers are actually viewing. So for most direct consumer brands, the majority of your traffic is mobile. So we are looking at mobile heat maps in click maps. The one thing that we noticed for all of the brands in our portfolio is that people were just absolutely hammering the images, or even just trying to scroll through the images on your product page.

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Zach Stuck: Now, with that being said, we weren't putting enough emphasis on these images, we kind of just like chalked it up. We made. We made these images. We knew that they needed to be kind of like designed hit on some value props and on some benefits.

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Zach Stuck: but definitely not enough attention there. So we ran a a b test. When we we launched this for Hollow it was 3,000 orders, 99.9% stat sig, and with brand new images in this carousel, and pulling those images out from just the carousel, and actually having the thumbnails below on that image we saw a 20% lift in conversion rate, just like absolutely massive lift

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Zach Stuck: that blew us away. So now every single person, every brand that I'm talking to I'm like, Hey, have you redesigned your images? Are you thinking about your images for your product? Page? Because, if not like, go spend some time on that.

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Brad Ploch: So what did they look like before they were? They were like no tax on them. Pretty, simple.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, I mean, we had the classic, you know. So 1st image product, image on white, second image product image with a couple of arrows with some value. Props. 3rd image, maybe like a customer photo. Nothing crazy.

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Zach Stuck: you know. We knew that they were important, but we didn't know how important that they were so essentially the way that we're thinking about this now. And I think that this is how everyone should think or like process it. And when they're when they're trying to figure out what goes in here is we started to design sections for our product page that were basically the 4 or 5 reasons of things that we needed to convince people of why to buy our products. So for hollow, specifically, we know durability is a big thing we know social proof and making sure other people that are buying is a big thing for us.

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Zach Stuck: that like what makes our product unique, which is the fact that we make our socks out of alpaca yarn is is a big thing. So we took, like the 3 to 5 kind of core reasons that we know work in ads. Work on landing pages now are going to be sections on our product page, and we turn those into the images up above. So you could essentially get a summary of all the content if you were to scroll on the product page right within those images. So it's really just trying to simplify and like, provide as much of that like

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Zach Stuck: high, punchy content that we know consumers want to learn about just right within that that carousel.

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Andrew Foxwell: People don't read right? So it's like, so is it? Just you think it's because it's showing on mobile like it's right there. It's easy for them is that is that the biggest part of it, like what percentage of the traffic that you're coming through? There's mobile.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, I mean, we're like 75 for most of our brands. So the majority we do lean a little bit older. So there's like some tablet and some desktop, but the majority of it, especially the the conversion. Like conversion. Within a 24 h period they see an ad. They go to landing page they convert is like almost all mobile.

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Zach Stuck: So for us, like the the 1st thing was okay, we designed new images. We launched it like, Oh, wow! This improved a lot. But then the second really add on that I think a lot of people do need to do, especially if you have a older demo is having those thumbnails of those images below the hero image that they can actually click through them and see that there's more of them. The little dots don't do enough

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Zach Stuck: arrows alone on just that main image doesn't do enough. So having those thumbnails is a is a key part of why we saw such a big lift.

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Brad Ploch: Nice makes sense cool. Yeah, I know you run a lot of traffic through through Landers as well.

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Brad Ploch: is. There is, so is most of the traffic still going through a Lander maybe kind of custom to hunters, for example, because I know that's a big demo for you, and then going to Pdp. Or is there.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah.

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Brad Ploch: Way that you could consider, you know, messing with these images related to the demo.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, so 95% of the traffic for hollow still, which you know, we're spending high 6 figures a month on Meta Ads is going to a landing. Page 95%, only 5% is going to collection or homepage, which is pretty wild, right?

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Zach Stuck: And the majority of those are just like, you know, a mixture of reasons why listicles, formats, advertorials like there's a few different things that we run, and then we push them to either a collection page or a product page. So I mean by the time that they hit a product page they should be fairly sold on the idea that. Okay, this is what the product is, but like to reiterate, hey? If they didn't read

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Zach Stuck: the landing page and they just click through the Cta button, it's like, Okay, well, we're going to re hit them with those same 5 reasons, essentially, that we would have in a listicle, or, you know, fully written out in an advertorial. So that's kind of how we think about it is like hit them, hit them, hit them, hit them on the landing page, hit them in the ad. Hit them on the Pdp.

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Brad Ploch: You can. Also, you can almost assume that they didn't read the listicle based on a 20% lifting conversion rates like they missed.

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Brad Ploch: Yeah, something.

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Brad Ploch: It was on the page, because that information's probably all there. To begin with.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the biggest thing that we realized is that they just weren't scrolling. They weren't scrolling on the product page. They were just sitting in that buy box section on Mobile. I think it was like 80% of people were only getting to the second section on our pdps, which is wild. And you know, you think if 20% of the people see that section and you know, 10% make it all the way to the bottom to see the reviews and our conversion rates 6, 7% like, maybe that's just the people that are converting. So how do we get more of those people

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Zach Stuck: of the 80% that don't scroll to see more of that content that should help them convert. So.

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Andrew Foxwell: Yeah.

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Andrew Foxwell: one of the, I appreciate the idea. I mean one of the general thesis that we had for this podcast. Was like, we're all texting each other all the time, anyway. And so this was an idea to bring you as the listeners into a lot of this. So a lot of this is not very fancy in terms of production. It's not very, you know, crazy in terms of you know something that we

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Andrew Foxwell: dialed in. We're just trying to make sure that you are getting the idea that you can go and transfer it right away, and that you're privy to what we're talking about on a daily basis.

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Andrew Foxwell: So that's just a general concept that we want to make sure we put forth for those of you that are listening. Number 2. Second idea that we have Brad low effort, review image ads. This is unedited. Customer. Review images and captions consistently outperforming polished ads give us the give us the tea on this one, my friend.

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Brad Ploch: Yeah. So what if I told you that you could get Ugc. But ads that perform better than Ugc for way cheaper? Would you be interested in that.

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Andrew Foxwell: I'm in.

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Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, yeah, I'm very interested. I love it.

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Brad Ploch: Cool, sweet. So yeah, something that we do with basically everybody that we work with. We do this for our internal brands as well. We go to the top products. And we basically just download every single image or a lot of the images straight from the reviews, and we roll them into the ad account straight up. One of the things that we do along with that is, you take the copy for the review unedited.

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Brad Ploch: like graphical error or grammatical errors and all I just like load them into the body of the the text inside of Meta, and just let it rip so

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Brad Ploch: review images as is text as is loaded into the ad account, and that seems to work extremely well. Time and time again I've seen it become some of the top spenders, if not the top spending ads. If I had a thesis as to why or theseses, however, you phrase that, Andrew, it's because, like it just looks organic right? And like, I think there's a i think there's value to having ads that you know, break through the noise and don't look like they're part of the feed. But I think there's also value into like

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Brad Ploch: having ads that seem like they're part of the feed experience. To give you an example of where this worked out, I went and pulled one recently, where, over the course of the last year, we had a client where we launched their original review image as is, and since then it spent about $15,000, which, like at the time for the amount that it spent, was quickly became a top spender. We took that. We took the top headline from another Ad.

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Brad Ploch: We mesh them together, still pretty organically edited. Looks like somebody maybe edited it on like an Instagram story post and reposted it, and that has that that individual iterated version has spent $190,000 since then. So 10 times the spend. But we wouldn't have done that second version had we not known that that review image had potential.

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Brad Ploch: So yeah.

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Zach Stuck: I

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Zach Stuck: wished you would have told me about this sooner. You were like, oh, no, we do this all the time, for every client I'm like, why have you been holding on to the spread? This is so annoying. So yeah, we did the same thing for what it's worth. You told us about this in the group chat I don't know. A week ago we launched it for Hollow. Of course it's working. I think the like special sauce of it is really taking the review grammatical errors, random words that people, real customers use.

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Zach Stuck: and putting that in the ad copy, and even using that as like headlines. I think that's like the the secret sauce to it, too. It's like, yeah. The image definitely feels like your Aunt Sally posted it in your feed. And it's going to be like, you know, really yellow and kind of crappy. So you might like, stop and be like, what is this? And then you're also going to read it because the words that are used are just like, not standard ad copy.

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Brad Ploch: Right.

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Zach Stuck: I love.

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Brad Ploch: Right, and like getting them is super easy. So just to like, bring it home with, how can you do this? We literally like once a quarter for at least for our internal brands. Clients we don't do this as often for. But even if you have your automated reviews set up, and collecting images and videos. That's great. But every single quarter you can prepare plain text email that says, Hey, we'll give you free product like subject line. Do you want free blank? Here's the product. They open it up. And it says, basically.

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Brad Ploch: if you leave an image review, we'll give you one free product. And this is what we do for our internal brand, because the the cost of it's very cheap. If they leave an image review, we'll give them one free product. If they leave a video review, we'll give them 2 free products.

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Brad Ploch: We get a way. Better response than our normal kind of like, Judge me flow on top, and on top of that you also get the images. Now, like, I think there's probably some legal parameters you want to consider. So maybe ask your attorney about like what you should be saying, because I think there's some considerations that customers are supposed to say like, Hey, we're not asking them to leave a good review. We're just saying, Leave an image. So they're not like coaxing them into that necessarily. But it's super cheap, right? So like the cost of the product to us. Inclusive

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Brad Ploch: shipping is, you know, 20 to $50 when you're going and paying Ugc. Creators which are worthwhile. Don't get me wrong. But you can get a $50 ad that cranks, and in this case spent $190,000 plus and growing for 50 bucks.

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Brad Ploch: Yeah, I think we're worth it.

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Andrew Foxwell: That's a good deal.

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Zach Stuck: The the legal thing is an important thing. I think everyone should definitely look into that. There's something to be said, though, about free like, if you're giving it to them for free versus like paying them to post a review, I think that's where it starts to get extra gray. But yeah, I mean, this is a no brainer. We do send the same type of thing free product for image review. Now.

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Zach Stuck: thanks to Brad making me realize I'm an idiot not doing this sooner. But yeah, this is this is awesome. I mean, I think if you're especially if you're a small brand and you don't have a ton of budget for creative. This is just a no brainer to add. You know, 10 more image ads to your your Facebook account every month.

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Andrew Foxwell: Let's talk a little bit more about social proof. As an idea of Facebook comments as social proof on Landers. I mean, this is something I think we've done a little bit of we've heard about or like, take review, you know, obviously put reviews on there, but not like the actual Facebook comments themselves, can you talk about how you're doing this, Zach, and what this looks like in terms of putting it on the on the Landers.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, I think

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Zach Stuck: it started with us just kind of talking about what is the best version of social proof. And what do people actually read. And what do they think is like? Bs, right? So I think general consumers are getting smarter and have gotten smarter. There's more direct consumer brands. There's more like direct response marketers out there than there ever has been. So I think people are like kind of reading into more of what's on the page the

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Zach Stuck: the the biggest thing that we were talking about is like testimonials. I think most customers think they're kind of Bs. If the image feels a little bit off. They're like, Okay, this is just made up. Reviews are a really good spot to Brad's point, like, I think, that, you know, utilized in like ads. It's a great thing. But comments on Facebook. They're coming from the platform. They know exactly what the ui looks like.

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Zach Stuck: It feels very real. It feels like, Oh, there's no way this brand can make this shit up because it is actually what someone said. And it's a true Facebook comment. That's just screenshotted. So that was like one of the things that kind of came up during like a strategy session with our team is like, Okay, Facebook comments feel very real to Brad's point, like there's mistakes in them. People say, wild stuff like, let's let's try to utilize those more. So, of course, using them in like Facebook image ads.

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Zach Stuck: Even video ads is like, kind of well known people have done this. But what people aren't doing enough of and what we started doing. And even if you go look at Hollow's like ad library and go look at our Landers. You're going to see it is we're taking screenshots of like, really well written and just like easy to read and very punchy Facebook comments, screenshotting them, putting them into our lander around product Ugc kind of style images.

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Zach Stuck: And the intent here is like, okay. Instead of doing like a classic testimonial in a box with an image quotes at a verified customer whatever any of that. Bs this like.

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Zach Stuck: get straight through to the point of hey? A real person said this about this company, and it's going to convince them to like, trust us more. So I think more people should be doing this. I think there's a ton of value in Facebook ad comments from your prospects to customers like you can take it and even utilize it for questions that people are asking, so that you can like make an FAQ. Section out of these things? These are questions that a lot of our people are asking. And here are answers to them.

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Zach Stuck: There's a lot that can be done with this, and we've we've done it

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Zach Stuck: across all of our brands now, and it's working so.

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Andrew Foxwell: I mean, it's so interesting, like the the tie between Number one, I think thematically in terms of advice. That's really actionable.

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Andrew Foxwell: So much of it centers on landing pages. I feel like it's and and Cro and I feel like for time, you know, we because we all came from, or a lot of us came from the world of

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Andrew Foxwell: being Facebook marketers and being like Meta marketers. First, st right? That that's where the optimizations sit that we feel and talk a lot about. And so we sit in that and talk about all right, creative optimization, creative velocity, hooks, etc. And there's this whole other piece to it.

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Andrew Foxwell: And we know this, but it's like it does get ignored. And you know, sitting in the minutia of landing page optimization and trying to connect those 2 worlds is where so much can be had. I mean, we're not talking about complicated stuff here, necessarily. Right? And I think that's a really interesting piece that we think about the flow of like, what does your funnel look like? I remember one time, Zach, sitting in a meeting with you, and you were pitching, and you were talking to somebody.

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Andrew Foxwell: And you're like, I can promise you, if I just look at your funnel, I'm gonna find like at least 10 things, and I've never even seen your funnel

00:17:21.741 --> 00:17:35.149

Andrew Foxwell: on an intro call. And it's like, and I think that's true. You can look and see all these opportunities if you're even if you never talk about the meta aspect at all, of like, how easy is it to actually just like, put something in your cart and make a purchase on your phone, you know, like.

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Andrew Foxwell: for sure, actually quite cumbersome for most people. So I think

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Andrew Foxwell: this one of that validation of the the Facebook landing, you know the Facebook comments is huge, you know, and utilizing that real connection from real people like it's in. And you know, as long as it's real, I think you're good, right? I mean, as long as it's really genuine. I think you're solid.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah. And I do have to give a shout out. I don't know if you're watching the video version of this, you will see Ryan Dhoni, the cro landing page goat, just literally walked behind me and sat down. He must be taking a call.

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Brad Ploch: Lives.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, he he knew he knew we were talking about Landers.

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Andrew Foxwell: The Cro expert in the Foxhill Founders community as well. Ryan Doni.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah. Yeah. Shout out to Ryan, and a little shout out to Page Deck, it's a it's a great tool that we use for all of our homestead clients for landing pages. But yeah, I mean, some of these things are coming from Ryan, basically just trying to like he's thinking about landing pages all day, and he's like, what are the things that like dumb this down? Even more because I think a lot of brands get so obsessed with the design of these pages, and they're like, Oh, it has to match my website. It has to match my vibe. No dumb it down, I think. Like, if I'm just going to throw out one other concept that I think everyone should test is

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Zach Stuck: truly make a landing page. That's just text. We just launched this for one of our brands. It's literally just text no images. Just text a headline, couple, paragraphs and a Cta button at the bottom of it, and it's absolutely ripping.

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Zach Stuck: You'd be surprised at like how dumbing these things down and just making it easy to like. Understand what's going on can be really helpful. I mean, one other thing that I think is just really funny. I obviously all of us have friends outside of Ecom that don't look at these things all day. I was in the Twin Cities with with one of my good friends, and I had him looking at the new hollow website that we're about to launch.

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Zach Stuck: And he was like.

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Zach Stuck: I was like, just explain what you're kind of like thinking about and whatever. And he was like. Well, can I click on this? Or can I click on that? Or can I click on this? I'm like, no, you can't click on any of those things that's not going to do anything. So I think there's things as simple as like making sure that on your landing pages, on your pages like things don't look like buttons. This, this ties a bow. And like really brings us back to why these, you know, Facebook comments work. It's because the Ui consumers are used to. So let's make it as simple as possible. Let's keep the uis like used to what they're looking at, and conversion rate should go up.

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Brad Ploch: Yeah, have you tried like comment, reply, type ads, where you guys like pull up an actual like comment, it's popular on Tiktok is just like an organic theme where it's like people are. Brands are addressing questions that people are asking like. It's somewhat an extension of that not to go against what Andrew was just saying about how Landers are super important, and we often ignore them for ads. But I'm back to the ads.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, but it's like, we.

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Brad Ploch: We see this work really well all the time. For example, we had a client that they launched a holiday related product, and it was like the founder in the warehouse, and he posted it as a story. And it was a 2 part story, and we had downloaded both versions of the videos. And I think we accidentally uploaded the second one once, as like, okay, did. The story didn't make sense, because it was kind of like in the middle of showing. It's like this is $50 whatever, and that crushed it was easily the best ad in that entire period, and like, had we not made a small mistake on like how to launch it, and it was just like

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Brad Ploch: it was like chill in the in the warehouse like answering those questions. I feel like sometimes, just like addressing questions and comments like can be a really thoughtful way, but of also dumbing it down. It's just like, really simply answering exactly what people are asking.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, yeah, Brendan, my head of performance. Creative, has had a request for me to go shoot an ad in our warehouse, answering ad common questions for like 3 months. I just haven't done it yet. So.

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Brad Ploch: You gotta do it.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, I guess I absolutely have to.

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Brad Ploch: I'm on team. I'm on Team Brendan here. So.

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Zach Stuck: Oh, yeah, yeah.

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Zach Stuck: Okay, you got to get into this next one, Brad. This like retention campaigns on Meta.

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Zach Stuck: kick, kick us off, and I have to. I've got a couple questions for you.

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Brad Ploch: Yeah. So we for a long time. And I think a lot of people in d 2 c kind of look at Meta as like

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Brad Ploch: new customer acquisition, and any platform is new customer acquisition. We're spending money to acquire new customers, and we don't want to spend money to target people that we have on the email list. Like we can send them an email, we can send them a text. It's a lot cheaper in theory than retargeting or running ads to them on Meta.

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Brad Ploch: We've tested this out a little bit this year in a few different brands. And just to give one example, we have a client that they have like a pretty extensive catalog. I wouldn't say it's like hundreds of products, but it's like tens of products. They're releasing new products on somewhat of a regular cadence, like maybe monthly.

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Brad Ploch: And they're pretty mature in their segment now. It doesn't mean that they're like the biggest brand of all time. It just means like they've reached a lot of people in their demo. And so we set up a retention campaign. The specifics of it is, we are targeting people who haven't purchased within 90 days, and for them the 90 day definition isn't is intentional. It's because if you pass that 90 day window. You're pretty unlikely to come back. You're not opening emails. You've already.

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Brad Ploch: Maybe you unsubscribed. You're not responding to literally any other type of marketing. So we're gonna hit you again with an ad we are using one day click specifically. And Min Roas, the reason for the Min Roz is mostly because

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Brad Ploch: the size of that list is not massive. We want to control the volume on a day to day basis. And because the variability in the pricing or the price of the products. We're using a little bit of everything. It's top ads across the catalog and has led to rip. And it's crushing. They're up 100% year over year in repeat customer revenue, it's more efficient than their acquisition, as you'd expect. And that's kind of what we hold it accountable to anyways.

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Brad Ploch: And like, it's just driving insane same margin for them. You know, their their contribution margin has doubled year over year. As a result of this. Yeah, it just rips. And so for brands that are kind of in that same space where they have a lot of history, and or not even a ton of history. But it's like people are not coming back because they're not opening your emails anymore. It's just been a low cost way to get some folks back in the door.

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Zach Stuck: So.

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Andrew Foxwell: Retention piece to bring it back. I feel like this is something we used to do all the time in terms in terms of Meta, and we just haven't, because of the way that things have been structured with Ascs and everything else. So it's good to. It's good to hear this are you? Is this across like you're using this in

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Andrew Foxwell: most of your accounts that have a catalog, and if they don't have a catalog, are you like, what else are you doing to take care of these folks.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, is it? Dpa, or just ads, like, yeah, good.

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Brad Ploch: Yeah. Glad you asked that. I'm using catalog in the wrong in the non traditional Facebook way, you can throw it. You can use a Dpa. I think that works totally fine. When I say catalog, I meant, like their actual product availability across their store. We're using top ads specifically. So, things that have worked really well, particularly, for you know, like some of the newer products in the last year or 2, featuring those a little bit more prominently, because people that have been on the list for 5 years like don't might not

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Brad Ploch: that those exist otherwise? And we're kind of using that as the way to get people back in the door. So Dpa can work. But we see it usually works better with like proper creative like, you have to go reacquire. Those people basically is like the mindset that said, like you should hold it accountable to a little bit of a higher efficiency target, because you probably already paid to acquire them previously. You don't want to just reacquire them again at break, even unless you know you're like Zach, and you know that when people come in by a second time

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Brad Ploch: like that. The chances they buy a 3rd time is really really high. I know you mentioned that for for Hollow recently.

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Zach Stuck: Yep, yep. So I mean, basically my entire strategy to growth marketing is, Brad tells me things that are working for him, and I just copy and paste, or just like screenshot it and drop it.

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Zach Stuck: Torso.

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Zach Stuck: Max. So we launched this 2 days ago, and to like, give you rough numbers. I mean, the spend's not crazy. It's like $1,800 in spend it spent like $700 yesterday, half the in platform Cpa. Of any other campaign. So like we're getting people back that fell off. And these are people that are

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Zach Stuck: to what Brad said. Right? So this is like traditional cbo setup. Not Asc, like you're definitely adding, you know, true audiences in here, people that have bought that haven't bought again in the last 90 days. And it's just like it's ripping so. And you know, it's wild that we yeah, it's wild that we don't do this like, you know, everyone's like, oh, no. Asc, only 0 exclusion. Really all Meta.

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Andrew Foxwell: A lot of people did.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, all Meta is is remarketing and bottom of funnel, like, no. But let's think about getting those people back in the door. So yeah to your point, Brad. I mean, go for it, and then I'll talk about the second purchase thing.

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Brad Ploch: Yeah. Well, I was gonna say, like, I hate the idea of it because it's just like it goes against the way that we've kind of done things, and but maybe that maybe that's what we need to start accepting a little bit. But the one thing I was going to say about Asc is like, I don't love it in Asc, because if it, generally speaking, and I'm going to use the word incrementality here, and not that I have, like an incrementality test. To prove this. I've just seen the numbers work. But, like my assumption is that

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Brad Ploch: Facebook in platform raws is going to be higher on people who are familiar with your brand. And so I don't want my repeat customer revenue

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Brad Ploch: tainting my Asc, because, especially if you're using cost controls, because then it's just going to continue to optimize more for that group of people. And maybe your repeat customer rate suffers a little bit as a result. So that's why I like to split it out is because we want we want to hold them to different efficiency targets in the platform. Basically.

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Zach Stuck: The one thing that we're planning to do with this is also anytime. And this was kind of like the old school playbook. Anytime. There's a new product drop. We're just like launching those same ads in in that campaign. Right? So,

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Zach Stuck: yeah, anyways, I'm I'm really stoked about this. The one thing that we in to kind of like share our perspective on this like second and 3rd purchase thing for hollow.

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Zach Stuck: We've just been so focused on growth. And like we just forget about. Hey, I have these customers that haven't come back and bought again. Everyone talks about Ltv, everyone forgets about Ltv, it's the reality, like everyone forgets about people coming back. And what can I do to get people to come back? And this is what it's such a simple, easy way to just be like, Oh, yeah, I can bring 1015, 20 customers back every single day at, you know. 500 a day budget.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, I mean for us, like we we realized, you know, 15% of customers are coming back and buying again within a 365 day period for hollow and for socks like that's pretty low and should be better. We're just so focused. And our ad account was structured in a way where it's like we're only focused on new customers. So doing, this is just a no brainer to try and like close that gap of instead of 15% for 365 days. Let's try and get 15% for 90 days. So I love this idea.

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Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, it's a really, it's a solid one. Let's go on to the so talk about before we wrap up the meta kind of account structures, and maybe even a little bit of creative velocity as we get into it. So meta account structure stuff in terms of what do you guys have working? Are we talking about, you know.

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Andrew Foxwell: are just Ascs. Are we talking abos for creative testing? What kind of bidding strategies are you guys using generally because I feel like, right now, we're we're definitely hearing a lot more about Cbo and with like min volume on the you know, within there, in terms of like creative tests that are running and letting them compete against the winners that are in there. I would say that.

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Andrew Foxwell: you know we always go in the in the, in the phase of like cost caps, working, not working whatever in that phase. And I feel like kind of. We're in 50 50 land right now, from least what I least we have. And then at least, what Fox will founder members are seeing. So what do you guys got going? What's working in terms of structures.

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Brad Ploch: Yeah, I don't know when this is coming up, but I'm pretty sure Zack was on Twitter today talking about cost caps and and lowest volume with people. So maybe you wanna start with what you're seeing.

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Zach Stuck: Well, I mean, the reality is that cost caps can work great and manual bidding can work great, and we use them a few different for a few different reasons for Hollow. We moved over to them last year, and I want to say, like September, because we knew that we only had so much inventory to sell.

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Zach Stuck: We knew that we could do like specific numbers and monthly revenue. We knew that our production was like basically just trying to keep up with where we were at. So it was like, Okay, well, let's just force profitability. Then why would I run lowest cost and just let Facebook. Go get me customers at, you know, kind of all different swings when I can just say, you know, stay profitable every single day and put, you know 2030% to the bottom line every day. So

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Zach Stuck: that's why we did it 1st and foremost. Otherwise, I'm still a lowest cost person. I love lowest cost. I think it makes a ton of sense.

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Zach Stuck: The reason that we're flipping back now is like inventory is getting in a better spot

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Zach Stuck: is the volatility that we've been seeing so like we literally had a day last week that went from middle of the week. This was, I think, was this last week. There was nothing in the news that day that was that crazy, I mean, like news has been wild lately, but like that day it was like pretty even keel day over day spend dropped $10,000. And we're like, what is happening like buyer intent today didn't drop this this much off a cliff

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Zach Stuck: and that can be detrimental to your cash flow. So like one thing on on our end is like we have. You know, our our head of finance is just like on us every day. This is so much you can spend every single day. We kind of know weekends we can scale up. We'll kind of pace back down midweek, and then we'll like that's specifically for Hollow. But dropping $10,000 in Ad. Spend that we weren't anticipating can like completely jack up your cash flow, forecast for for a week, or for a month, even if it holds so.

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Zach Stuck: I like the idea of like lowest cost for the fact that we can plan, and we can know how much we're going to spend. And if we can have a rough baseline of like Cpms. And cost per clicks and traffic and conversion rate, and we have a baseline of those numbers. We should pretty much kind of know where the day is going to land from just like a cash out

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Zach Stuck: perspective. So that that right now is kind of what's like really getting to us is that we had so much volatility that we're starting to shift, shift, spend back so hollow. I think now is like, I don't know. 70% lowest cost, 30% cost control.

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Brad Ploch: Yeah. And I think, like how you're organizing. There's a whole other piece of this which is like, How do you organize the creative tests. And I can go through some of our structure stuff. In a second, the creative creative volume thing is probably a whole, separate podcast that we need to think about doing. Because I think you guys are cranking out a crazy volume. I think we've got a system that's that's doing really well, right now, too, just to quickly touch on our account structure. I agree with a lot of things that you're saying. I think

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Brad Ploch: we generally organize things by if we're going to use cost controls which which we do often, we're organizing campaigns by product, and then single or very limited ad sets within until we Max out that ad set and need to add a second one for more creative. Basically like, that's the reason we add it. And that's because we want to set the the cost control relative to the expectation of that campaign. If we have a $50, Aov, and we expect that to be the value that somebody's buying out. We want to set our cap relative to that

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Brad Ploch: versus having a product that's $100 and a product that's $50 in the same campaign just makes it really hard to kind of predict the outcome there. And just like you don't. Wanna you don't want to spend $50 to acquire the $50 customer, right? Simplifying it. So

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Brad Ploch: organized single campaign by product or by funnel slash offer. However, you want to define. That is kind of how we do it. We're pretty heavy on cost controls, but I'm not married to that solution. So we bounce around a little bit.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, I mean, right now, the way that we're structuring things.

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Zach Stuck: I'll talk talk holos specifically for, like our internal brands, they're mostly the same as like we'll run a cost control in an Asc environment.

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Zach Stuck: that seems to have been like the most stable thing for us. And then, of course, we'll we'll test like target realize that it worked really, really well for a period of Q. 4, and kind of the start of q 1, and then absolutely fell off. So we flip, flip back to caps.

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Zach Stuck: This is a

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Zach Stuck: like, I think everyone needs to be aware that there are moments where, just like Meta changes, they change the algorithm. They there's just shifts in consumer buying. And the way that these, like, you know.

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Zach Stuck: technical mechanisms are working can just change dramatically in in a few day period. So

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Zach Stuck: it is really frustrating at times, because you're like, hey? I thought I had this repeatable system that's gonna work and metal will just like rug pull you but that's where I think. Like always being willing to try something if you're a cost cap person. Try target Ros, you know. If you're a cost cap person, try a lowest cost thing. If if you have the budget to to give it a shot.

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Zach Stuck: but that said, Yeah, I mean, like all of our lowest cost is cbos, like, we don't run any abos right now, which I think is like a big thing that a lot of people are saying that creative testing and abos is the way to go. Meta's even talking about it a little bit.

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Zach Stuck: But this is where it's like what works for you works for you, I think, like Andrew, you've talked about this so much over the I mean, like, you have been teaching all of us Facebook ads for the last. I don't know. 7, me 7, 8 years at this point.

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Zach Stuck: and what works for you works for you. So I think it. You know it depends on the brand. It depends on things to Brad's point, though.

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Zach Stuck: having campaigns specific to to products is a no brainer. If you're not breaking out campaigns by products

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Zach Stuck: because Aovs are going to be different. Consumers buy different products differently. Right? So having that set up versus having the crazy volatility of like same campaign, a bunch of different products, a bunch of different collections that you're pushing to. I think it just makes it harder on Meta to try and find consistency. So.

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Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, I think it's the stability of being able to do that with your campaign, you know, as you're as you spend more, and you have the catalog. It's going, you know, separating. Those is great. I mean, I think you have to look through the lens of what we know about Meta. Through all of these pieces. Target row, you know target row as being one of them. Right works great in Q. 4. Because the volumes there, right the volume is not there as much, I mean, how many people do you know in the United States, which is.

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Andrew Foxwell: you know, where Meta's most valuable users and buyers are really and Western Europe that said, Look, I'm going on social media breaking. q. 1 like, how many people do, you know? I mean, I know, like 10, I could name right? That did that. So I think that Daus were down. And so that's why we're going back to lowest cost. It makes sense.

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Andrew Foxwell: And that's always been an argument against cost. Capping right is because it's a volume game, and there's going to be days where it's good and where it's not, and it's going to go up and down. And there is that volatility, and you have to accept that if that's what you're going to do, which is, it's just like anything else that's balanced. It's never all one thing, it's never all one thing, and it's adaptability, right? And it's being able to

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Andrew Foxwell: to kind of make sure that you're shifting across these ideas. I think

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Andrew Foxwell: that's what we'll continue to get to in this podcast of of, you know. Look, this is an idea of that's today. And and this is what we're seeing today. And that's that's how we all keep each other going. I do want to say just from an ego standpoint. It's important for me to say that in the scaling course that I released 7 years ago.

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Andrew Foxwell: I put in the, in the social proof Lander ideas in the course. It's not a big deal that was so, you know all I've heard. I heard.

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Zach Stuck: Sometimes.

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Andrew Foxwell: I heard a native American saying that all is all that all returns in the circling wind. Somebody told me that one time, and so here we are. We're returning to the idea

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Andrew Foxwell: 7 years later, right.

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Brad Ploch: Every idea that you hear on this podcast came from something that Andrew, did you.

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Andrew Foxwell: Years ago. So that's.

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Brad Ploch: Yeah, well.

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Andrew Foxwell: Now that I'm really now that I'm yeah, yeah.

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Zach Stuck: Andrew did it 7 years ago. Brad's doing it now, and I'm copying Brad. So that's.

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Andrew Foxwell: There you go, I mean, look! That's the thing right.

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Zach Stuck: And then you can copy me. Yeah.

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Andrew Foxwell: I mean, I think a lot of it is interesting, you know. So as you think about Meta campaigns and the structure of this, this stuff's going to change. And it's important to go through this. But I think, yeah, we'll talk about creative testing on another podcast and creative velocity, which is like a big topic right now. But before we wrap up guys, anything else that you want to share with the audience, the one thing I'll say is, you know. Look, you're listening to this 1st episode. And if you listen to this point, I really appreciate it.

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Andrew Foxwell: Email, any of us, andrew@foxhilldigital.com and we can put the other guys they if they want to, they can stay there.

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Andrew Foxwell: Please don't email.

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Andrew Foxwell: Maybe maybe you're so Twitter dms, or whatever, but like.

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Zach Stuck: You can do with me on Twitter also.

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Andrew Foxwell: What else you'd like. You'd like to hear about.

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Zach Stuck: Yep.

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Andrew Foxwell: Or what else you're curious about? Because we want to make sure that this is helpful. You know ultimately that we got together and said, We're doing this like, we're just 3 guys from Wisconsin, like also go, pet, go. But we are here to help like that's our whole servant mentality. Honestly with this.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, I mean, Brad, I'll let you go if you have any. Last last thoughts.

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Brad Ploch: No, I was just gonna I mean, there's a lot of things going on in the news in the world right now. So like there's a lot of things we could talk about that I'm probably too stupid to say so. I won't. I won't dive too deep into them. So no, I'd say, Yeah, thanks for tuning in. And if you have any questions, yeah, you can definitely DM me on Twitter.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, likewise. Andrew is too kind by offering out his his email. I'm gonna be

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Zach Stuck: ruder than that. But yeah, hit me up on Twitter. If you don't follow me, Zach, I'm stuck. And then, Brad, I'm sure you can share your handle, too. But yeah, I think last thoughts to kind of tie a bow on this we are just excited to share what's working inside of the agency businesses inside of the brand businesses

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Zach Stuck: in a time where things are like pretty, pretty, manic, and kind of crazy. There's all the tariff stuff that's going on right now, depending on. When you listen to this like could be, you know, hopefully wrapped up, and much better than what it is right now.

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Brad Ploch: 400% could be.

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Zach Stuck: Yeah, I mean, yeah, we don't know where that's headed. But yeah, our goal is to is to be helpful and just to share the wins, and we feel, you know, I think all 3 of us could could follow the same sentiment that we just feel very grateful for kind of where we've gotten in our careers, and all the people that have supported us and helped us kind of get to this point. So the thesis is to help others and share what's working, so you can just easily easily copy it and roll it out and and make more money.

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Andrew Foxwell: Absolutely well, thank you for listening, everybody, and we'll look forward to having you listen to the next episode of scalability school.

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Zach Stuck: See? Everyone. Thanks.

Mary Foxwell

PDP Landers and Meta Creative - Ideas We Wish We Tested Sooner

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Creative Velocity And Systems With David Herrmann