Jennifer Lo | Paid Ads & Ad Creatives for DTC Ecom

Nobody asked for it, but here's my update on ad performance that I'm seeing over the last month or so across the DTC landscape. Performance in July was a bit down following Prime Day (expected). Some brand saw success and some massive success, and most of those actually were on manual bids for the majority of their spend. August though is on a rocket-ship for all brands (manual bids or not). Meta's UI and all in-ASC/AI mess is VERY real. In my portfolio I have more than 4 different UIs. Some are worse than others. Every time a new UI is updated we tend to see performance struggle for a week or so. 1. Creative is still king. Invest in a team that can rapid fire your creative and make it diverse (not just different hooks). 2. Landing pages matter, a lot. Estimated action of these is different, make sure you're hypervigilent on actually proving which works / doesn't. 3. TikTok Shops is a complete and utter mess for most brands. You can't trust it. Their advisors / reps are overwhelmed. Be VERY careful about investing here. If you're lucky enough to have a rep, cool. But if your product has anything questionable about it (kids stuff, organic products, etc) good luck.. 4. Manual bids (I know) crush, we've all kind of know that. Finding ways to make sure they are part of your system is vital, especially as we head into Q4. 5. Snapchat / Pinterest serve a purpose, don't be so against testing these. But have a plan + measurement idea before jumping in. I like Haus + Kno personally. 6. If all else fails, try a new ad account. In Meta we've seen multiple times that firing up a new ad account somehow does work in reversing performance. Something fresh about it? I don't know. 7. Content designed for Reels first is outperforming the majority of content right now. In fact, we're starting to see Reels creep up as a real player in returns. 8. CBO > ABO > ASC in that order 9. Retargeting engaged users + excluding engaged users from prospecting has worked again. (I dunno man) 10. Meta Shops is working, again. After the June bug and July bug, and many other bugs it's working right now. Not for all brands, but a good number. 11. If you do Meta Shops make sure you're paying attention to the shop layout / promo codes. It tends to just take anything from Shopify, be careful. Dedicate someone here. 12. Test interests again, across the board. I dunno, but it's been scaling well lately. 13. I'm very hard pressed to find any agency that can make TikTok / Reels content at scale. Almost all agencies are good at feed ads / story ads. Big opportunity here for someone. Ok, let's stop at lucky or unlucky number 13 today.

As a general reminder, Meta's optimizations may be a key killer of your performance if you're not looking close enough. This new one has sunk the most consistent brand in my portfolio this month. Dug deeper and it got turned on by Meta automatically and starting sending people to our most expensive product, not the product advertised. Buyer beware.