Mason Littlejohn

For years my favorite retargeting audience was the Klaviyo "never purchased" list. People on your email list who haven't bought. Warm users that crushed every time we served them adsLately it hasn't. Across a bunch of accounts, including my own, that audience just isn't performing like it used to. So I went back to a segment I built at Ruggable and rebuilt it live on the call this week. Here's the problem. Your never-purchased list includes everyone who ever signed up and never bought. Someone who grabbed a discount code 14 months ago and hasn't opened an email since is still in there. You're paying to serve ads to people who've forgotten you exist. This is how you fix it.Build a segment called Never Purchased Active Web Visitors. Two conditions. Placed order equals zero times, all time. And active on site at least once in the last 30 to 60 days. Both have to be true. When I ran it for my brand the full never-purchased list was 129,000 people. The active version was only 13,000. That's the same audience with all the dead weight cut out. Think about how much spend was going to the other 116,000. Sync it to Meta, swap it in for your old never-purchased audience in retargeting, and watch the difference.

Here's where most brand owners go looking for ad inspiration. Their competitors' ad libraries. And it's exactly why their ads look like everyone else's in the category. Some of the biggest wins I've ever had came from stealing a concept from a completely unrelated industry. A tech hardware ad becomes a clothing ad. A CPG ad becomes a golf ad. A sleep product's "your best sleep starts without a doom scroll" becomes "your best round starts with this tee." The format works because psychology works. Aspiration plus a problem plus your product as the fix. That structure doesn't care what you sell. Another one. A skincare brand's top ad of all time is just three words. Botox in a bottle. Everybody knows what Botox is, so the ad borrows all that recognition in a second. What's the famous thing your product is an X of? Free marketing in a rug. Fill in yours. Even the long yapper ads. A sock brand is running a three-minute video opening with "women are 10x more likely to get Morton's neuroma." Nobody knows what that is, which is the point. Open loop, tease it for two minutes, then the product. It's crushing. If you've got a problem-solution product, that format is sitting there for you. So this week, go look at ads in categories you'd never shop. Find the one that made you stop. Then build your version.

Current spend stack for my brand Tiktok/Chat ads went way better than expected this year

Every week someone tells me they can't make video ads because they don't want to be on camera. Here's your proof you don't have to be. One of our apparel brands has an ad that's the most-spent in his account and absolutely smashing. No face. No voiceover. Just music, text on screen, and his hands showing the product. Twenty seconds. So why does it work? Transitions. He keeps switching the shot. Different pair of shorts, different angle, close-up on the fabric. Every few seconds your eyes get something new. Meanwhile the text tells a story. Your brain is locked on the words, your eyes are locked on the visuals, and you keep watching. The hook is just "2.5 years later." That's it. Three words and you need to know what happened. And the story is real. It's his own shorts, aged and worn, and why he likes the old ones better than new. Every one of you has an anecdote like that about your own product. You just haven't filmed it yet. If you've been hiding from video, this is your format. Product, text, music, motion. Film it this week.

Here's a question I get on almost every call. "There are 8,000 things I could test on this one concept. Headline, image, message, sub-headline. Where do I even start?" My answer is a constraint. You get four ads. That's it. Four versions of the ad, max. Ideally one to four ads per ad set. If you're running $25 to $50 a day per testing ad set, that's all the budget can support anyway. And only one thing changes between them. Keep the image, swap the headline. Or keep the headline, swap the image. Change two things and you can't tell what worked. The reason this matters more now than ever is AI. It's so easy to say "give me 30 variations" and launch the whole pile. Don't. That's not testing.You end up spraying spend across 30 guesses and learning nothing. Test with intention. Which versions do you actually believe will work? Based on your reviews, your DMs, the comments on your ads, your gut. Make only those. Skip the ones you're already doubtful about, because you were right to doubt them. Stop trying to test a million things at once focus on testing with intention only.

10x your speed when you're rolling through Meta ad accounts

Most brands retire a winning ad the moment it fades. Performance drops, they turn it off, and they go hunting for the next brand-new idea. That's leaving money on the table every single time. A winning ad proves one thing. The message hit. The problem was real. The timing was right. None of that goes away because Meta got tired of the same pixels. So remake it. Change the colors. Make the text bigger. Swap the background. Throw some fall imagery behind the flat lay. Get a new actor.Keep the message, refresh the look. One of our brands is on at least the second or third version of the same moth-trap ad and it just keeps hitting. Lightning doesn't just strike twice. It'll strike 20 times in a row if you keep rebuilding the rod. Here's the discipline though. When you remake it, mimic the original closely. Same text placement, same sub-headline, same structure. If you change 10 things and it flops, you didn't test the concept, you built a different ad. Match as much as you can so there are fewer variables and you actually learn something. Before you brainstorm anything new this week, open your ad account and sort by all-time spend. Those top five ads are your remake list. Then get back to the drawing board. That's the whole game, week in and week out.

Here's why most brands kill their best top-of-funnel ads. They grade them on CPA. A cold ad reaching new people almost never shows a great CPA up front. Those purchases land in your retargeting and bottom-funnel campaigns later. So the ad looks like a loser and gets turned off, right as it's filling the funnel. You need different metrics for different jobs. For upper-funnel ads I look at cheap clicks, cost per add to cart, cost per checkout, cost per email signup, and two that almost nobody watches. Cost per content view. How much does it cost for someone to view a product on your site? Under a dollar is good. Twenty cents is excellent. That means people are clicking through and actually browsing. Cost per search. If someone lands on your site and searches for something specific, that's extremely high intent. Think about Google search, people only search when they're close to buying. Same thing on your site. A low cost per search means that ad is sending you a high-quality audience. The goal of a cold ad isn't the sale today. It's getting people into your funnel in a meaningful way, at a cheap price, so the rest of your campaigns can close them. Carve out a small slice of budget, say 3 to 5%, for ads that drive these metrics even if CPA looks soft. Then watch your other campaigns pick up. That's the feedback loop that scales the whole account together.