Audience Bridge Insights #21 - He Kills Most Facebook Ads in 3 Days. One Has Run for 2 Years.

The cost to pay a UGC creator these days is just not worth it when you can make dozens and dozens of variants of that same ad with AI actors, AI avatars.

What style of ad you're seeing out there that's working the best right now?

If the question is like out the gate style, just between static and video, I would say—

How long are you given a new ad to decide whether it's got legs or to kill it?

Normally it's like a max of—

What percentage of your clients Are trying to monetize people upfront through some type of mid-path welcome journey versus just trying to build that list and let the newsletter be the main monetization point.

And you just want to see some data. I definitely wouldn't recommend hiring an agency to just handle $1,000 in ad spend for you. Like figuring that out on your own and seeing if it's sustainable is probably best.

Welcome back to another episode of AudienceBridge Insights. I am your host, Chris Miquel, and today I got Manny Raya as the founder and CEO of Bulletin Growth, a paid newsletter growth agency that has helped acquire over 5 million subscribers over the last 6 years. Happy to have you on the show. How you doing, Manny?

Doing well. How are you, Chris? Thank you for having me, man.

Doing good.

Doing good.

I mean, the weather here in Florida is kind of crappy, you know, rain every afternoon. It's getting hot as crap and the humidity is getting to like 100%. So it's Not as nice as, uh, what, San Diego where you're at right now?

Yeah, San Diego's going through a little bit of a, of a quote unquote heat wave. Um, but heat wave out here is like—

What's the temperature of the heat wave?

I think heat wave out here by definition of San Diegans is like high 70s. If it's not in the perfect 68 to 72, everyone's just freaking out. So, uh, yeah, uh, you still get plenty of sunshine. That's not— it's not rainy or anything on the other coast.

Yeah, I feel like San Diego is always between 65 and 75 degrees year round.

Yeah, yeah. I think I just saw something that it's like 300+ days out of the year, it's in that range, which is a wild stat compared to anyone that I hop on the phone with in the Midwest or anything.

Yeah, that's crazy. Well, Manny is obviously a media buyer, really focuses— I don't know, really focuses— he's dedicated on really Facebook buys. And running that through his agency for his clients. So we're going to get into a lot of that, discuss what his strategies are, kind of how he does that, and then we'll get into some stuff, you know, maybe how he's leveraging AI and things of that nature. So if you can kind of just give a little breakdown on kind of like how you manage your campaigns, work with your clients to kick off these campaigns, and then what's your kind of your strategy or your system for like scaling those campaigns up to obviously get more fun? Because I think that's always been the hardest part when it comes to Facebook is a lot of people are like, oh, I'm getting these great cost per leads and stuff's doing good. Then they try to scale it up and usually it kind of blows up in their face.

Yeah.

So if you can kind of give us a little peek behind your strategies and your system.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'll get into it. Yeah, the overall, like setting the stage for anyone that we work with is Obviously setting the right expectations out the gate on their biggest why, on the why behind the investment into paid growth. I think it's one of those things where if it's not just like something where it's like there's capital investment or something, some other external factor that is pushing the growth investment here, most of the time I would say 80 to 90% of the time it is bootstrapped. It's like whatever revenue has been brought into the business for the newsroom that they're operating is obviously being reinvested into growth. And also just the why as to where their ROI is at on paid growth. If it's just top-line growth, being able to charge advertisers more, if it's doing specific funnels for low-ticket digital products, always understanding the why and setting those right expectations. And I think is where we always like to set the stage before we even bring them on and think about running a single dollar in ad spend. Once things are going, it's very much done for you on our end with anyone that we work with, where the only thing we ask them to do is to review and approve the creative every single week. And then we launch it, we test it, we look at the data, and we pull the levers that we need to on our end. For the most part, I think the conversation around the right expectations and how to scale up and the right ways to scale up spend come down to making sure that the first month is not one of those months where, well, For starters, we also don't really want to have anyone spending less than $2,000 to $3,000 a month in month 1 as their test budget because it does get to that point where if for some reason we allowed someone to come on board and only spend $1,000 a month in their first month in ad spend, yeah, CPAs may look incredible, data may look like it's crushing. And then month 2, month 3 come around and they say, hey, we want to spend— we like the data, we want to spend $5,000, $6,000, $10K. Yeah, the numbers are going to be a whole different ballgame just based on how aggressively it scales month over month. So for the most part, I've always said that if we can get some specific, like a specific sample size of data within $3K to $5K in ad spend in month 1, very likely that we can replicate those numbers with the right creative strategy obviously in place at $8K, at $10K a month plus. So for the most part, that's kind of how I always set the stage for anyone coming into the picture of paid ads for the first time for their newsletter is to, sure, if it's mainly a test and it's very much bootstrapped and you just want to see some data, I definitely wouldn't recommend hiring an agency to just handle $1,000 in ad spend for you. Figuring it out on your own and seeing if it's sustainable is probably best. For the most part with us, how we can scale it is by making sure we have the right amount of budget in month 1 and then being able to say we feel confident that whatever baseline CPA we found in month 1 at this budget, we can very likely replicate it in month 2 and month 3 if you want to scale it up, you know, 20 to 30%. So that's, I think that's probably the biggest conversation we have is setting the right stage for things to actually scale past month 3, 4, 5, and 6 of the paid growth efforts that they're taking on, you know.

Are you working with B2B and B2C clients, or you just focus on one side or the other?

No, it ranges, man. B2B and B2C for sure. We work with a lot of authors on the B2C side for their content. We work with a couple different B2B newsletters. One that always comes to mind on how B2B things can get is Home Pros, and they're a newsletter that runs— the newsletter is mainly for HVAC owners and managers in the US. So it can get pretty niche in terms of like B2B, the B2B side of things. Yeah, we don't discriminate in terms of like what area or category you're in. It's mainly just on setting the right expectations on the total addressable market. You know, it's a totally different ballgame on the cost per acquisition that you can expect from, you know, James Clear having a total addressable market of tens of millions versus Home Pros having a total addressable market of maybe $40,000 to $60,000+ in the US of like, you know, the high-quality B2B audience that you're looking for in that ICP. 2 different ballgames in terms of expectations and projections you can make, you know, on all your growth spend there.

So what are you looking at like in those 2 phases? Obviously there's different, you know, they're monetizing differently. Obviously the HVAC guy, I'm assuming they're trying to get service contracts. New AC stuff, or I don't even know. I mean, they're targeting the service people, so I don't know if it's who owns it. But how are you determining what stats are you looking for on that side to judge what the LTV is, what's your, you know, LTV over CAC for this person versus B2C? You know, what stats are you monitoring there? Where are they judging their revenue? You know, there's obviously different people that know their LTV over CAC down to the science, like Matt Paulson over at MarketBeat knows everything down to the dollar. So, you know, and I'm not sure what James Clear has on his side. I'm sure he's got his own products or something he might be pushing and selling that are causing, you know, generating revenue or whatever. So like, what are the differences that you're looking for stat-wise for different types of people? And then what's the main driver behind it all? Engagement? LTV. Like if you don't have it for those newsletters that don't really have, can't really tie maybe the revenue to a specific subscriber to really know that this source or this cohort basically generated this much revenue. It's kind of just blended because they're doing, you know, sponsorships, ad stuff and all this stuff. It's kind of blended. Then, you know, they'll maybe have like a revenue per engaged subscriber they can base it on. What does that kind of look like?

Yeah, I will say that there is no— it's very different when you're talking about B2B and B2C. Like there are some similarities, but there's also a lot of differences across every newsletter product and every newsletter business model. Like you said, there's some newsletters that are running 4 different monetization models and some newsletters that are crushing it with just sponsorships, strictly that, you know. So it does vary on like where the LTV to CAC conversation goes just based on what their model is and how they're attributing that to, you know, reinvest back into growth. Out the gate, I think for anyone who isn't, you know, really, really like mature in that sense of being able to tie it back to the dollar LTV to CAC in that conversation, I think on the B2B side, I will initially always say is— sorry, I don't know if you saw my dog back there.

Yeah. Why you two?

The— where was I at? Oh, on the B2B side. Yeah, for the Home Pros side of things or for any B2B newsletter, we really, really like to focus on making sure that first-party data is in place to be gathered and collected. I think tons of B2B newsletter operators and Jacob Donnelly has always like been shouting from the rooftops to making sure that is like the bare minimum for any B2B newsletter that's out there that's spending on paid ads. to make sure that you're acquiring that first-party data to be able to measure of the ad spend, tying back into UTM sources of the people that we acquired on Facebook in the last month, how many of them are actually within my ICP based on the questions that they answered on that post-subscribe survey. That is out the gate just one pretty strong measurement of success in being able to say if the ads are working or not working in the sense of are they actually attracting the right subscriber to your newsletter versus just any Joe Schmo that is somewhat interested in your content. So on the B2B side, that's where I would definitely lean into, like I said, as the bare minimum. For the sake of like the LTV to CAC ratio, we are definitely chatting with them, with each newsletter operator on their model to understand at what CPA does this make sense for their current, you know, be it monthly revenue and, you know, just looking at the different funnels that they're running, different monetization models, I should say, that they're running because sometimes, specific CPA works strictly for this monetization model, but it doesn't work for a different monetization model that they're working off of if they're looking at each one individually. Because a lot of the times there's always like, for the ones that are running 3 to 4 monetization models on a newsletter, most of the time I would say like 1, maybe 2 of them are actually the biggest drivers and the other 2 are just bringing in 10 to 20% of the revenue, if that, per month. So that's kind of how we like to just discuss with everyone on being able to say like, towards which monetization models are we actually reverse engineering all these CPA projections and goals for? And from there, that's just on us to make sure that we can implement the right creative strategy and the right ad copy for them to be able to actually achieve that net CPA that they're looking for to back into their monetization and all their projections that they're having. So I would say that's probably the same for B2C. Obviously B2C normally tends to scale a little bit faster and more aggressive just based on if the need for them is growth to be able to charge more to advertisers. That's normally where B2C plays into. But at the same time, I don't think B2C is one that you should absolutely discriminate against acquiring first-party data because that is still data that you can use to your advantage in some way, shape, or form. I've seen it plenty of times where it's not just helpful to have discussions with advertisers on who is on my list, just to be able to tell your advertisers like my list has, you know, 60% of them are over $150,000 in, you know, income, just that one data point. But it can also like bring up some ideas later on in the business around different products or different, yeah, different needs that you can fulfill for your audience just based on that data that you have on them. And it could turn into a different monetization stream later on. So it all ties back, I guess, to like that one bare minimum point that I mentioned. But the conversation around LTV to CAC does vary. Like I could probably have 24 completely different conversations with each one of our clients on that conversation. And it's all going to vary just based on You know, what they're running so far and also payback period, all that jazz on some of them. Like we know people, I'm sure you know people who want to have the payback period be in 24 hours. Some people look at it in 6 months and some people look at it, you know, 6 to 12 months.

So— I never believe the guy that says 24 hours, by the way.

Yeah, I know. I've seen it be done. Maybe once, and I say maybe, but it's a very, it's a tall order for any newsletter operator. Most of the time I do believe it, where you can, it can happen in 30 days for someone who has things incredibly dialed in. And when I say somebody, I mean like Matt Paulson that is incredibly dialed in on those efforts to achieve like a payback period there. And, but it also kind of just depends on, you know, all the channels that you might be running for, Paid ads and acquisition as well.

Yeah, I just had Andy Mackinson from The Assist on the show. And I mean, he's got it dialed in too. I mean, he actually had payback of like 7 days or less than 7, within 7 days he's got his payback, which is amazing.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So you and I both know Andy and we all know that he can get the payback down to 24 hours for some subscribers, but for most on his average, yeah, 7 days is definitely there. Yeah, 7 days. Which is not something To discount. Like, there it does, like, for most people, it does sound like a very achievable thing to get that payback period down to under 7 days or even 7 to 30 days. But I forget who I was chatting with about it on, like, the infrastructure needed to have that happen is no small task. It probably took Andy and Joanna months And I know this, I've chatted with them before, that it takes relationship building with advertisers. It takes months of setting the right infrastructure on the backend, all the surveys, all this, all that, to the point where some people just don't really realize, like Matt Paulson is the same way. He's been setting up infrastructure to have it so dialed in now for years. And it just takes time. It's not one of those things where you can come into the news hour world and spin up a newsletter, spin up paid ads and expect the money to just be flowing within 7 to 30 days either. I think it just, it's a matter of being strategic, but also putting in the legwork because it does require a lot of legwork for that payback period to be as short as possible that most people are itching for sometimes.

Yeah. I mean, Andy said it took him 6 to 9 months to optimize the landing page to where it's at now. Which increases conversions. I think he said like 35% up to like 60% or something. That's like you're basically getting double the acquisition that you were for the same spend. So you just basically cut that in half, which means your payback's gonna be faster.

Yeah. Different levers to pull for sure. But yeah, it's, I mean, oh, go ahead.

Isaiah, what percentage of your clients are trying to monetize people upfront through some type of mid-path welcome journey versus just trying to build that, that list and let the newsletter be the main monetization point? And do you see any difference between the 2 models and the length of engagement that a subscriber is kind of staying on the list?

I would say to the first question is probably max of like 20 to 25% of the clients that we work with are running that like mid-path monetization efforts, funnels, journeys, and setting them up in that way. For the most part, it's not a super popular thing where I don't think I'll ever get to a client roster of 30+ clients to where 50% of them are running that because it goes back to what you and I were just talking about, the infrastructure. It's not something that everyone's down to really dig deep on to set that up for 6 to 9 months and then be able to run it successfully because you can set it up in a month or 2. It may not be dialed in, you may not have the highest conversion rates, and it's just not going to live up to those expectations. Differences that I see between the 2 is that yes, no matter what conversion rate, if you have at least a 0.5 to 2% conversion rate on some of those mid-purchase journeys, depending on if it's low ticket, medium ticket, or whatever on the audience, for the most part, I do see That being a longevity play, I think it does allow you to recoup some ad costs obviously out the gate, just like if you were running Spark Looper or Upscribe right after. If it's recouping 40, even 30 to 40% of your ad costs per month, that ties into the longevity of, okay, we can let the other 60% definitely come in within the next 3 to 6 months. But for the most part on the other ones that are not running those Mid-Path Journeys, I think it just comes down to understanding, like on the B2B side, I think it comes down to like understanding advertiser demand sometimes too, if it's strictly like that being like 90% of the revenue there. For some B2B newsletters that we work with, they're already sold out for all of 2026. For others, you know, they're still working on trying to sell a couple in Q3 and most of Q4. But that comes down to, you know, obviously Still understanding like the scale of the newsletter. And also like, well, one conversation that I literally just had an hour ago is that if they are at that point of tens of thousands of subscribers and they're sending 2 to 3 times a week, every newsletter send is an opportunity for churn. So that's where the other like why, like why am I investing into it is just to not go into the red sometimes also.

Right.

To be able to continue that, you know, those rates that you may be putting out to an advertiser. So those are the 2 main differences that I see on like the questions that these operators are asking themselves on a daily, weekly basis. For the most part, I think there's so many reasons why like the investment makes sense into paid growth. But for a lot of them, realistically, we don't work with at anyone that does like this whole kind of like just considering it a game or, you know, and I'm sure you and I have come across plenty of it where they can just consider the news that are like a cash game, like inputs and outputs, right? Can I put in $5,000 here and get $10,000 out here kind of thing? We don't work with anyone like that. It's very much like established creators and/or like media businesses that are looking at this at a 12-year or, you know, 12-month rate of where can we be at in 6 to 12 months based on this investment, on this ROI with these monetization models and go from there. So there's a lot of similarities between them too. I think it kind of just depends which avenue you want to take.

Yeah, makes sense. Let's dig into more of the meat of campaigns and stuff like that. When you guys are setting up campaigns and running campaigns, I guess first, what style of ad is that you're seeing out there that's working the best right now?

If the question is like out the gate style, just between static and video, I would say video is where most of our ad spend is going. Probably 80% plus of the ad spend as a whole. If you put all the ad spend of all the clients that we have at the agency, probably 80% plus of all that ad spend is going towards We've seen some waves of success with static, but it's never been a long-term thing where it lasts, where more than 3 to 6 months of statics being the winner every single time. So video is definitely where it's at. I think we've all seen it at this point around how, call it basic or ugly, maybe some of the video ads that actually win are out there. It's one of those things that I don't think myself or any other newsletter growth agency is going to change. It's one of those things that like, it's not broken, why fix it kind of thing, especially. And because at the same time, if we try to fix it and it breaks and we just try to go outside the mold of like, let's just try to run these statics because everyone else is doing these specific videos or just running video. It's also a disservice to the people that are trusting us with the ad spend in there. So that's why we kind of stick to what works. But there's a lot of experimentation on a weekly basis where the team on my end is pumping out dozens, if not hundreds of creatives per week across all the clients to test and be able to see if there are different formats that might have a potential to be like in the winning race that we can double down on. So yeah, videos is probably the best one.

When you say— I know for a while I was always seeing stuff like, you know, one of the big winners is the— I mean, it's video and not video. It's like the background moving, but then like there's some text.

Text over it. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, text overlay. Is that considered video or is that—

That is considered video. Yeah. Just because there is like some background movement to it and because it can Obviously like lay within the Instagram Reels ad placement. It'll obviously come up as a video rather than just a static image on there. So that's what we consider video. The UGC side of things, like most of that has, on our end, it hasn't been a strong, strong winner across multiple ad accounts for a while now. But we still test it because there are some scripts You know, with good copywriting, you can make a really, really good UGC ad, but it has kind of like transitioned into much more of like an AI production scene. And for some clients, they're just not into that, which is totally fine. We always are very transparent and ask before we try to put that together if they know it's like a deepfake or an AI avatar that's actually speaking into it. There's a lot of video editing that goes into it before we push any ad. out into the wild so that you don't— you can't tell whether the AI avatar like is actually AI with the lips looking off or whatever. But it has moved into that because the cost, at least on my point of view, the cost to pay a UGC creator these days to make an ad, make a singular ad, is just not worth it when you can make probably dozens and dozens of variants of that same ad with the same script across 12 different actors, AI actors, AI avatars. And so you kind of are spreading your luck out a lot more on the UGC side whenever we do that, rather than paying the one UGC creator $250 for the video to just hope, you know, cross our fingers. We paid them. Let's cross our fingers that this works for us. We're out of that money, especially if it's being transferred over on that cost to the client as well, you know.

Are you, are you, when you're doing like UGC ads for like one of your creators, let's say James Clear, are you giving him your ad copy to kind of like go off of and get recorded? Or is he just giving you a bunch of recorded shit and you're kind of just like slicing it up?

Most of the time we slice it up, but there is like a lot of, we go like line by line. We never tell anyone that's like doing a founder like point of view, whether it's James Clear or someone else who like We're talking about in the first-person point of view of them being the writer and founder of the newsletter. It is normally like they— we just tell them, go line by line, read into the camera a couple of times, we'll pick the best ones and slice it all together rather than them memorizing the entire script and trying to look into the camera to read it off.

Right.

So on that part, yeah, it does take— it's a little bit more of a complex process for the actual, you know, founder, writer of the newsletter to actually get it done. But for the most part, I think those are also some of the more Successful ads. The other thing that we've we've done a lot of is the just using the the voiceovers. Sometimes we've done it before where we just tell them like just do voice notes, just send us voice notes of this script, a couple different of the lines, and we'll put it together with again some video background in there and the subtitles, and that can be another one. That was one of the newsletters that I highlighted in my my newsletter where I share like each. Like each week it's one of those like winning ads that we're seeing that's working. And it was one of those AI voiceover ads, but it's also one of those things where it does take a video editor, it does take the recordings, all the subtitles kind of thing. It's not a 2-minute thing that you can spin up in Canva either, you know?

So you're providing all that for people? You're doing all the creative, the video editing?

Yeah.

Managing, setting up all the ads and all that stuff?

Yeah, it's A to Z on our team in terms of, What we take care of. Literally the only thing we ask people to do is review and approve the creative every single week. They're not writing any ad copy, they're not launching anything within Meta ads. So long as they tell us what budget they want to spend, it's on us to get the creative and the ad copy produced, launch it, optimize them over time, report every single week on what we've seen in the last 7 days on the data, and then just have those weekly or monthly conversations on Where do we want to be at next month? What went right? What went wrong in these last couple of weeks, et cetera, et cetera. That's kind of like what the comms look like between us and every newsletter operator that we work with.

How long are you giving a new ad to decide whether it's got legs or to kill it?

Normally it's like a max of 3 to 5 days, a very, very like strict max of 3 to 5 days. Sometimes we can tell within the first 48 hours if it's got legs. And this is all just based on how complex your media buying strategy is, on how many ads you're putting into each ad set, all this other stuff, and then how much control you're giving Meta to test different copy variants or whatnot. But normally we can tell just based on where the ad spend has been going and where the click-through rates are at, obviously backing into the CPAs and whatever. That we can, we've done it before where a lot of times we kill some ads within the first 48 hours of them running. Other times we just kind of let them run for 3 to 5 days to see if there's any swings towards other variants. And then at that point it allows us to keep, you know, 2 out of 5 ads instead of just only running 1 out of the 5 for a little bit longer. But yeah, all that said, it's, there's probably a lot more axing done of ads that we launch. of all the ads that we create than success rates on like having a bunch of them be winners and then trying to distribute the wealth amongst them. For the last 6 years that I've done this, I would say that, you know, if you have 1 out of 4, 25% of the ads that you make actually be winners and actually hit the CPAs that you want to hit and, you know, back into just your overall ROI targets, you're crushing it. Most of the time it's probably more like 10 to 20% of the ads that you create are actually going to crush it and sustain the ad account. So it's a pretty good humbling expectation to set when getting into it where you do need to play the numbers game and not spin up 2 ads in a week and really cross your fingers that both of them work. Because if neither of them work, then you're just going to be burning cash for a week or 2. Right.

And now that you identified a winning ad, What does scaling that ad look like time-wise? Like, I don't know, give us like a basic kind of scenario scale where like you're, you're whatever you would say, like your start, I guess. What's your— what would you say? How are you splitting the budgets when you're testing? And then from once you get that winner or whatever that is, how do you scale that up to where you're getting the most out of it before you're starting to see, you know, diminishing returns?

Yeah, I think for the most part, we do this strategy of we normally have 2 campaigns running with every new user that we're working with. One is where the winners are always running, and that's where 80 to 90% of the ad spend is working. Of the monthly budget that we have set, 10 to 20% is where the testing budget comes into play. Once we have 3 to 5 days worth of data to be able to actually call it a winner, Then we call— when we do what we call graduating that ad from the testing campaign to the main campaign within its own ad set, or if one of the ads in the main campaign that has a lot of the budget is proving, showing some diminishing returns, then we might just completely replace it and then start driving a bit more ad spend towards there. For the most part, I think most of the time when we're testing ads, it's like $40 or $50 a day to be able to get enough conversions over 3 to 5 days and be able to take that data at face value. If we're only spending $10 a day on it, by day 3, we still may not have enough data to actually say it's a winner. So by that point, once we're moving it onto graduating, if it's starting at $50 a day, no matter what it starts at, $50, $100, or $200 a day on what we consider a winning ad, we're never scaling it by more than 15 to 20% daily. And that's just a cardinal rule to not do the whole learning phase reset within the campaigns because then you're just confusing the algorithm every single day on the data that it's getting and just literally hitting a hard reset button. So no matter where it starts on the baseline, 15 to 20% gradually is where we go. Normally we don't do 15 to 20% for 2 to 3 weeks unless it's absolutely necessary to hit a target monthly budget. But for the most part, we have plenty of ad sets and plenty of winners all working at the same time that we can spread it out amongst there. But yeah, 15 to 20% is where we always cap it off on scaling that. And then once we do it probably 4 to 6 times on that 15 to 20% increase, normally try to see if we can let it settle, see if it can sustain that CPA after we've increased it almost 100% over the last 2 weeks, see if it can sustain the right CPAs that we're looking for. And if not, if it's just continuing to increase every day or every 2 days, then we start looking at, okay, where can we distribute a little bit more? Where can we test a little bit more? At the same time in the background, once we identify a winning ad, there's also stuff going on on the backend of the team where we've identified winning ads across different ad accounts. We need to double down on this format, on this copy, on this hook. That way we can just spin up Like call it like V2 of this ad that's a winner already. Just hopefully have a second variation of it that can run on its own with its own budget and hit the same targets that we're looking for. So more of an art and a science, kind of complex once we identify a winning ad on what happens within the ad account and what happens outside of the ad account to be able to sustain that long-term. Because at some point or another, yeah, it does, things will go south. And most of the testing and creative production that we do is to be prepared for when things do go south, to not have to freak out and have to like, you know, pull down ad budget aggressively because it's not looking right or whatever, you know?

Right. I've blown up an ad campaign or 2 myself in my days.

Yeah, same, same.

What, uh, when you're talking about graduating, just so the listeners understand, when you're talking about Because I don't have the answer. I'd like to know, when you said you're graduating an ad set or an ad into kind of your winner campaign, are you able just to move an ad or an ad set over there, or do you just have to recreate it over there so that it's in there?

And then the other one— It's the answer is kind of both because like you can't really, you can just duplicate it. Like if you're pretty good at media buying, you can just duplicate that ad but have it be duplicated within the new campaign or within a new ad set. The more manual way is just going to your OG campaign where most of the ad spend is at, either creating a net new ad set or creating a net new ad within an ad set that already exists. But both are doable, but both are what we would consider graduating one ad from one campaign to the other. Yeah, it's one of those things where you kind of have to roll the dice on it. I will say when I say roll the dice on moving that over because whichever route you take of the 2 that I just mentioned, it is still like a hard reset where you may not see the same CPAs that you saw within the testing campaign.

That's why I was asking. I was going to be like, so when you did it, do you see it not perform as well sometimes just because it has to relearn or whatever it was? And so that's kind of—

that was why I was asking. It's a good question because plenty of times, one thing that I forgot to mention is that we don't just If it's a winning ad within the testing campaign, sometimes it's on us to just be like, hey, it may not work once you graduate it over. And if we try to run it from $50 here to over to $100 to $200 plus a day on that campaign, so let's keep it live. Let's see what happens in the high spend campaign. And if the data just isn't looking right, then we just kill it in the high spend campaign and try to scale it within the testing campaign on its own. Obviously it's a little bit more management because then it's trying to scale both campaigns or an ad set within both campaigns, within the testing and the original campaign. But it is something that we always keep in the back of our heads and not just completely shut down once we've decided that it's a winning ad within the testing campaign where I'm like, okay, let's just shut it off. Let's cross our fingers and hope that it works once we graduate it. We kind of look at both over the first 3 to 5 days once we actually put it in the new campaign and then decide, make another decision. Okay, which one is actually still performing over time? Which one do we scale? Sometimes it's both. Sometimes, most of the time we end up keeping it within the graduated campaign, but there are a handful of times that we're just continuing to scale in the testing campaign because that's where, again, Meta's ad machine, that some things on the backend of Meta's ad machine we just don't control. We just kind of have to roll with the punches and kind of— tweak it in the best way that we can, you know.

And then from that, what is the longest running winner you have active right now on any campaign, any client, whatever? Like how long has there been an ad running?

Probably more than 2 years of an ad running. I don't think I'll say the name of—

You don't have to say it. I was just wondering how long.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's probably been 2 years. that one single ad has been running. There's been multiple ads running and I can't say that it definitely hasn't been that like 90% of the ad budget over those 2 years has just been going towards that ad.

Right.

But a fair share of the ad budget has been going towards that one ad that has been running for more than 2 years. And I think one thing to mention on the tactical side of things for this is that when it does get to that point, there's 2 routes that an ad can take. It can take the route of sustaining for 2+ years, like the one that we're talking about. And the reason why it'll do that is because it gets so much organic engagement at the same time where this ad, when you see it on Facebook or Instagram, it has thousands of likes, thousands of comments because it's been running for that long with so much budget behind it. Most of the time I will say that it only works for an ad that has a very high total addressable market. I don't think we've ever found an ad to run for more than like 4 to 6 months on the B2B side because the total addressable market, it's just the frequency of how many times the audience that you're targeting that fits for this ad sees it. It just turns into diminishing returns. So for the most part, I think you can set your sights on an ad normally lasting 4 to 6 months at most. Definitely on the B2B side. On the B2C side, you might get lucky and it can run for 6 to 12 months plus. But most of the time, like I said, it kind of works out on the B2C side if it runs for that long because it gets so much organic engagement that it just looks like a regular post that so many people have engaged with. And it's kind of just more of like pouring fuel on the fire for that one sometimes. So yeah, not the—

that definitely doesn't happen like out of Yeah, yeah, I knew it didn't happen often. I was just wondering. I knew there had to be an outlier there just to see. Yeah, there's always one.

Like, definitely an outlier. There's definitely a couple of others. I would probably say like handful, probably 5 to 6, where there's an ad that's been running for 6 to 12 months plus. Most of them again on the B2C side, but it kind of just depends on— it's like you struck gold in a way once you can find an ad that lasts that long without Um, having the CPU blow up, you know.

Do you ever see like fluctuation, like it's like crushing it performing, then it kind of goes down, then it comes back and keeps going, or it's kind of pretty steady?

Yes and no. When I say yes, the, the period of it like going through, through that rocky wave is no more than a week or 2 where we're like, when, when we're like very much hawk-eyeing it and seeing if, if this is the time that it just has to be shut down. But again, for the most part, I think once it passes that month mark, 6 to 8 month mark. Very likely that it can keep running for another 6 months just based on how much organic engagement has gone behind that ad and how that translates to really strong ad performance on the backend.

Awesome. Since the hot topic everywhere in every industry these days is AI.

Is it?

I saw you, a recent post of yours, Excuse me, talking about how you're using Beehive's MCP, dig into the data and then using that to help you either create better ads, know what's performing better, you know, feed that back into the feedback loop. Please share kind of how you're using that to help you guys with your media buys.

Yeah, absolutely. I think on the media buying side and like, I guess how it's helping us make the right decisions and pull the right levers is by Just being able to understand a little bit more of how everything is tying together on the acquisition side of things, on the CPA side of things, and the engagement and the first-party data. There's so many questions that we can ask it to be able to tie in all those metrics together and not just fully rely on just open rate or just click-through rate. Being able to tie all those things together and you can give it a rubric in a way of being able to like outline every single metric that you're looking for and also tie it to the first-party data. Like if you can ask it, you know, if you're a newsletter that is acquiring, you know, HR directors or C-suite people in HR, being able to ask it of the people who have answered my post-signup survey within the C-suite, what is the breakdown of these people that have been acquired by Facebook ads? And then you say, you know, the UTM source equals Facebook ads. Pull it strictly from there. What are all these metrics that I'm looking for? Break them down by each ad set or each cohort, and then you start looking into the UTM mediums. That's kind of how we break it down because we use the UTM sources to be able to do this kind of segmenting on the backend within just the segment tool or the MCP and be able to go back into the ad account and off of whatever the MCP gives us and being able to put in all those metrics, take all those metrics into account, we can then say, okay, we really have to tone down the budget on this ad set because it's clearly 4th or 5th place where all these metrics are being combined in here. And then on others we're like, okay, this ad set is, and this ad is proving some really strong signals based on the click-through rate, the open rate, just overall engagement that's going on within the past 4 weeks. Let's try to bump it up 15 to 20% for 2 weeks and see if it can hold this. Like, we'll ask the same questions in 2 weeks after we pull some levers and see if it's actually proving out our hypothesis and/or if it's something that like we blew up and we have to like go back to the drawing board on it. So those things that like, it's one of those things that would take just any newsletter operator probably a full day at minimum. To really pull in all the data, slice and dice it as much as you want, and then be able to make a decision off of it for the sake of your ad spend. At minimum, might take you at least half a day to a full day. This can do it in 10 minutes and the MCP can do it in 10 minutes and we can do it across all the clients every single week on a given day to be able to tell our media buyers, these are the levers that we have to pull because of XYZ that we pulled from it. So I just think it's really powerful for the sake of the, like, replacing the manual grind of segmenting, like cohort analysis. Like cohort analysis was one of those things that, and still is one of those things that is not done by the majority of newsletter operators on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis because it is a manual grind, especially when you're acquiring thousands of subscribers per month, being able to go in and tie all that data back into something, you know, 1 or 2 sentences that gives you like some actual decision-making power to go back into your ad account and pull a lever is a grind. And I've done it before and it takes you a couple hours per client sometimes. Now it's completely replaced and you can do it, like I said, in 10 minutes. So I just think it's really powerful to like remove, almost completely remove that barrier of entry to like some actual productive cohort analysis on the subscribers that you're acquiring and the subscribers that are on your list currently to be able to, like I said, make more informed decisions and just make better decisions for your ad spend. Because that's realistically why we're using it a lot more within us, because every client that comes on and partners with us is trusting us with whatever budget they want to put behind Meta ads. So if we can use the MCP to make it even 5 to 10% more efficient over time, over the next 6 to 12 months that they're working with us, It does very much add up into the right decisions being made weekly and monthly, you know. So that's really how we use it, kind of just combining a couple different metrics. You know, sometimes the questions that we ask are a little bit too tall of an order at times, but we can ask separate questions and then try to piece it all together ourselves. It gets us 80% of the way there, like any LLM should, you know what I mean? Yeah.

No, I mean, the stuff it can do is, man, what I'm thinking of right now, I don't know if you've been able to do this yet or not, but like, because now you can dig in so easily with the AI down to the medium or at a campaign level, down to the ad set. Have you, like, in the B2B case, say you're targeting, right, senior-level employees, but then you see like, Oh, this ad is generating a lot of junior-level employees versus this ad, which is all senior. This, this one might be a little more expensive, but it's giving me my senior-level employees where this one isn't. So actually my cost per senior-level employee is way lower over here and then use that to kill the other one.

Yeah, it's exactly that. I think I wrote up a post about it very recently on my LinkedIn around a very, very almost exactly similar case like that where we were running a couple of different tests. And within the 2 to 3 days after that test started running, we started noticing data just like that where 50% plus of the ad spend was going towards the wrong ad and the wrong ad set. So we made a very quick decision in that case to make sure that we shut that one down or very much decrease the ad budget there. And even though the cost was going to be higher on the other ad set and the other ads that were running through there, those were very clearly just based on all the first-party data that was being gathered, that's be connected to the UTM source and all the other items in there that we're looking for, it makes it a very easy decision to pull those levers on our end. So yeah, like I said, I just think it's very powerful, very powerful for the sake of making, yeah, just making more informed decisions, but also not having to spend hours to piece that data together. Oh, I would never figure that one at all. I mean— Yeah, yeah. To get all the data together. Like I said, I've done it before and I completely, I didn't say that to like nudge at like news operators doing the wrong thing for not doing cohort analysis every week or every month. It's very much a grind, but I think if you're on Beehive and you have access to it, might not be that much of an excuse anymore if you can get it done within 30 minutes and really—

A lot of the ESPs are starting to give access to an MCP, which is great. Yeah. You know, the problem's always been Even with Beehive before the MCP, like they didn't give you the data you needed. You know, you could create segments, but that's about it. So you don't get the historical stuff. So trying to get your LTV and your cohort analysis is impossible. I mean, they have the, at least they had a little cohort kind of graph. You could see stuff. So that's definitely going to be a game changer.

Yeah, I think it'll make every newsletter operator just a lot smarter in every decision that they make. Not just on the growth side of things, on any organic acquisition that's being played in might even help the content strategy. I can absolutely see it help the content strategy side of things if you can dig into the engagement on certain subject lines, the engagement on certain things with your welcome email. Over time, as people come to play with it, I think we're going to see a lot more very, very useful case studies of this. On our part, we're just so— we have the horse blinders on to be able to use it for the right decision-making on the media buying and within the ad accounts, you know?

Yeah. Are you guys driving any campaigns for SMS signups?

No, actually. We were working with one or two early, early on into this when the agency came about a little over 2 years ago, but it has not been like a huge appetite across any of our current clients. Or any realistically in the last month that I've had probably anywhere from like 10 to 15 calls with like net new news developers that are thinking about paid growth. I don't think they've chatted about SMS either. Right now I think it's, I think SMS comes into play a lot more when, not to say you're tapped out, but when you're trying to measure like a different monetization stream or try to attempt—

Well, you have to have a big monetization stream because SMS is so expensive to send. Yeah. So you have to, You have to be able to monetize it and people, especially on the B2C side, if it's just a newsletter, say, you know, 1440 or Morning Brew or something like that, they can't really monetize it. People are trying to find ways now to monetize it, but it's not easy. Obviously, Paulson at MarketBeat monetizes it like crazy, but he also is in finance and that's one of the, you know, higher netting niches. So it works for him. Right.

Promote stuff. Great. The right stars have to align for sure, because like you said, like Morning Brew and 1440, if SMS was really the one of the end-all be-all of these days across the newsletter industry, those guys would be doing it at that scale. Because we can say like any newsletter, you know, 500,000+ or 1 million+ subscribers can actually get into it because they can sustain the costs. But it actually doesn't back into it sometimes when you look at the costs and what, you You know, again, LTV to CAC on what that looks like and if you can afford the additional costs on it. So yeah, I mean, I think at some point it may be done strategically, but now I feel like the conversation has been here, has been around for at least 2 years lightly and maybe in the last year gotten a little bit more aggressive on it. But for anyone that I think starts to like really look into it and then realizes the costs, most of the The monetization models that they have in place don't really support the total cost of it right now. Yeah, that's why I think right now none of our client roster is working off of it. And I just don't see it being like, aside from like the— I guess you do have to look into like the niche that you're in, like within the finance when you're talking about Matt Paulson. I think if your niche and your monetization models both support something like that where there is a much more high just overall higher average earnings per subscriber that you can get off of it, then it might be something to look into. But something I feel like most people still need to dial in what they have going on with email first, you know?

Right. Facebook Forms, yay or nay?

Nay. The lead forms, right? Where you— Yeah, yeah.

Facebook lead form.

Autofills. Yeah, hard nay. I, my, my Initial nay for it has always been that the autofill is almost— there's a certain amount of friction that you have to create to still be able to get a high enough conversion rate and it be a quality email and a quality lead. For the most part, what I've seen, unless they changed it and it's autofilling a different email these days, like based on like what Meta can capture off the user, it'll always autofill that email that you created your Facebook account or Instagram account with. And so it's still like there's just not enough friction to be able to say, oh, there's already an email autofilled. I just click and I click submit and I'm done. And I signed up to this newsletter, but I signed up to this newsletter with an email that I created in 2001 when I made the Facebook account. And so most of the time I just haven't seen it play out successfully. And I just think it's the right amount of friction comes down to the landing page being used. All that said, I could still be wrong because I see very mature media companies and some newsletter operators running towards lead forms, but not the majority. There's still like 20 to 25% of the newsletters out there that I see doing it that I think are very well established to have this knowledge and it might still be working for them. I know it works for them on the CPA side of things because you'll always get a much, you know, a much better CPA overall because the friction is so low and the conversion rate can be 70 to 80% on those forms versus 40 to 60% on a landing page. But if I had to, like gun to my head, it had to be a yes or no, I would always be a no on it.

Yeah, it's the right answer.

Yeah. I can't wait for you to come after me like, oh.

Perfect analysis, rubber stamped. I mean, this is just like last month I was working with someone. They were getting like, sorry, my, my schmerl is going crazy over here. The— they were getting like 5%, like open rates and stuff on their welcome email and stuff like that. I didn't know they were running Facebook forms and I'm like, oh God, fuck, your deliverability is awful. We got to figure this out. I'm like looking into it and then finally dug in and found out he was doing Facebook lead forms and I'm like, why? I'm like, stop that. Just run regular Facebook to a landing page and let's see what that looks like. And then he switched it, did that. And then like, I mean, like overnight, fucking like 45% open rates on the data coming in and everything. It's like, it's like Jesus. Yeah. Yeah.

You have that case study. I have probably at least anywhere from like 8 to 10 case studies over the last years of any newsletter operator that I've talked to about this, that they, they tell me they've been doing lead forms. They like the CPAs, but their open rates are trash or whatever, this and that. Anytime I was actually able to convince them to move to a landing page, same thing, same thing happens on open rates are up, CPAs are still stable. It's not to say that it's an issue with your creative, you know what I mean? It's an issue with, well, what email you're getting out of that flow through there. Yeah, it's normally always a culprit. So hopefully maybe this podcast will convince at least one person to switch over to landing pages.

Appreciate that.

Don't tell anyone.

Now, just, just to, you know, be devil's advocate, if you are running it for a call center, probably still good because the phone number is probably the right phone number. That's probably those ones that you're seeing, like quality people running those ads is because they're, they're probably, they probably have a call center slash SMS back office thing that they're using those leads for, not just to send emails out. All right, so we're getting to the end of it. Uh, go through a few quick lightning questions. Um, know you're just doing Facebook right now, but I think you have experience with some other channels. Uh, you know, going back some, is there a paid channel that's overrated right now?

That's overrated?

Yeah.

Oh, there's one that's overrated right now.

Um, and we're gonna back it up with underrated ones. So if you have the underrated one first, we can Call that one out and then you can come overrated.

I think overrated in terms of it just not working, but on the B2B side, it, there, there just being like such a strong appetite for it lately, uh, for us to try it with, with, with some of our clients has been LinkedIn. I think there's been a lot more trials and tribulations in the last year or two within our agency, within the newsletter ecosystem as a whole on, on the B2B side where It just has not been turned into very extremely common knowledge that LinkedIn is just 90% of the time too expensive to advertise on for a newsletter. Most of the time you're going on there, you're going to get anywhere from $10 to $30 as a cost per subscriber just based on the CPMs that you're being charged by LinkedIn. LinkedIn will never identify that you're a newsletter advertising on the platform. Most of the time it's, it's SaaS where they have, they can They can spend $300 on an email submission and they're fine. That's a good lead gen for them. So I think that's why that one's probably my most overrated because it's tough to really nail that one down to where, unless you can make $50 to $100 off of every subscriber over the course of a year or 2, I don't think it would make sense. Underrated advertising platform, This one, this was probably like an easy answer for me because I've seen it done before, but it's also not extremely scalable, is newsletter to newsletter advertising. You've seen it before and it's always been talked about. I did it when I was at Morning Brew a lot, advertising in other newsletters because people who read newsletters will read your newsletter. So it's kind of like the same thing within like the engagement. Most of the time you will get the highest engaged readers and subscribers from advertising in another newsletter within your category of content or niche in there. But it's also not scalable. Most of the time it's a grind for 1 or 2 people on your team to reach out to the newsletter, get something set up, provide them ad copy, provide this and that. And sometimes it's very much like taking bets because you don't know if the appetite of that audience is actually going to be strong for your newsletter. So you might end up paying way more than you expected on the CPA side of things. So it is a bet, but it is still underrated if you can kind of line things up very well within your content category to advertise in other newsletters. Because 9 times out of 10, when we did this at Morning Brew or any case studies that I think you've heard of people doing this, they will always say that that's their number one acquisition channel for the sake of engaged subscribers that they can get from it. It's just a grind and it's, it's definitely not something that you'll ever be able to scale into the tens of thousands in spending a month. So just because there's also like a limited bucket of newsletters you might be able to advertise in, you know.

And you can't— it's like you can't run that in it every, every day. So you're not gonna get a constant flow of leads from that one provider. Like, once a week, once a month, maybe. to keep on getting quality subs.

Right.

What's the biggest myth about paid newsletter growth?

The biggest myth. I think the biggest myth would easily back into the CPA side of things that anyone can get under $1 or under $2 for your CPA because it does very much change up the conversation. Like if now I know the conversation is very much shifting month over month now into not chasing the lowest CPA possible. You're also not saying like put shitty creative out into the world and get the highest CPA possible. That's also not the solution here. But the conversation is changing towards work on the monetization models that can actually allow you to pay a bit more per subscriber that can back it up and actually pay more for the engaged subscribers rather than chasing the lowest cost per lead there. For the most part, I think It's always going to be a conversation around wanting the most efficient cost per subscriber. And I'll never negate that because again, the right creative strategy and the right ad copy will get you the most efficient cost per subscriber. But sometimes the lowest is not the most efficient. The most efficient is obviously getting somewhere in the happy medium of an efficient cost per lead, which may be more like 2 to 4, 4 to 5 plus, but also making sure that's an engaged subscriber or a subscriber that's valuable and will actually convert to whatever, products or funnels that you're putting out or you're piecing together within your own newsletter ecosystem. I think that's always going to be the biggest myth is going into it that your target CPA should be under $1 or under $2 for any and all newsletters.

Well, hey, if you're running local, it should be like 35 cents, I hear.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Local, I think you and I were both going to comment. You might've already done it on Dan Oshinsky's Great guy, because I know he works with a ton of local newsletters, but I've worked with local newsletters in the past, you know, 5, probably 5 to 6 of them. And you can absolutely get it there, but it only lasts like 2 to 3 months in the cents range before you start— the TAM is just always way too small on a local newsletter. Not enough people. Sustainable. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, you can get it there at the 35-cent mark, but right. That conversation translating into B2B is a hard, hard wall to run into, I guess, as a new property, if you're expecting that.

And we'll end on this last question here. Maybe, you know, for all those like people who have up-and-coming newsletters or they're getting their stuff started and they're looking obviously to run some paid acquisition, Facebook, maybe not ready for someone like yourself or an agency to run it for them, not an expert. What is the one thing you would tell the publisher to fix or have ready before spending a dollar on ads?

Fixing your— one, making sure that you have a thank you page and a welcome email. The thank you page can obviously be after the signup survey if you're in B2B. So make sure you have a signup survey after they subscribe. After that, make sure you have a thank you page and welcome email. But if you already have all 3 of those, put together, fixing those and making sure that they have the best structure possible. There's so much knowledge out there from yourself, Matt McGarry, anyone else who knows that these components from the start of a subscriber journey really, really do matter. Because I do think it can be a pretty significant cash-burning strategy to not, one, not have any of those in place, but two, also not having them as optimized as you can. To make sure that you can kind of get them like quote unquote activated correctly. That's something that I've seen in the last like year or 2, especially within this agency on understanding the like how those things are actually like a pretty primary factor on making sure they exist, but also are optimized before we spend a single dollar on ads because it can turn into just lower engaged subscribers overall, deliverability, I'm sure. It affects it if you don't get those replies or clicks on your welcome email, etc., etc. Those would be those 2 things. And like I said, there's so much knowledge out there on, on all of them. Beehiiv provides the knowledge on it. Yourself, Matt, a couple of other experts and pros in the news industry that provide like best practice structures on those things. Those would be my, my, my go-tos in terms of what to fix before, before spending a dollar.

Awesome. Well, where, where can the people find you if they want? And is there anything you want to pitch?

So nothing to pitch outside of, yeah, if paid growth ever is ever of appetite, I know a guy. But after that— Yeah, you got it. After that, you can find, well, my handles on social are kind of weird because it's Banny Reyes with 2 Ys in both of them. So if you can put that together, cool. If not, Bulletin Growth, B-O-L-E-T-I-N. I don't know if Any Spanish speakers will be watching this podcast to know that bulletin means newsletter in Spanish. So you can spell that out. I just didn't want to go— I also probably didn't want to buy the domain newslettergrowth.com. So that's where you can find me. Awesome.

And I'll have links to that in the description and stuff.

Cool.

Anyone who's listening. Awesome, man. Well, Mani, I appreciate you coming on. Love the insights on the media buying side. I'm sure the audience is going to enjoy it.

Yeah, this was great. Thanks for having me on. I'll be sure to keep active with you on LinkedIn and pour more insights to anyone listening or trying to read our stuff from time to time on LinkedIn.

Awesome. All right, Manny, well, take care and talk again soon.

All right. Thanks, Glenn.

All right.

Bye.