The Old Facebook Ads Playbook Is Dead

If you're a business and if you run Meta ads, if you're spending anywhere from £5,000 a month, heck, up to £500,000 a month, then listen up because the old playbook is dead. You see, the algorithm, it's changed. The consumption patterns of people on the platform have changed. We need to adapt. And in this video, I'm going to be sharing with you the 3 pillars of Meta ads so that you can be successful. Pillar number 1. Creative. Yes, ad creatives have always been important. They are the visual element people see that determines whether or not they actually click your video. Well, nowadays they are more important than ever because, yes, whilst they still are the visual element, they are now becoming the driving force behind the targeting and who actually sees our ads. We've entered the age of specificity where if you want to win, you you have to create specific ad creatives for specific people. And the reason is the underlying engine of Facebook Ads got a massive upgrade about 12 months ago when the Andromeda new algorithm was launched. I'll spare you the technical jargon, but what you need to know was Facebook basically gutted the ad platform and pulled the engine out and replaced it with a brand new one. And this guy is a beast. And what this guy can do is effectively look at so many millions of different ad variants and find the perfect one for the perfect person. And it does this by looking at an ad creative, looking at the words inside, looking at the image, looking at the video, looking at the landing page, looking at all the context around the business and deciding who it should show the ad to. And so as a result, the more specific we are in our ads, the higher the response rates from people. That has always been true. But now the more specific it is, the more accurate the algorithm can be at showing it to the right person. And so when you have higher response rates because it's specific and more pinpoint targeting, that is a double whammy and we love that. So he and she who can create the most specific and relevant creative wins. That is the name of the game in this day and age. And so how do we do this in practice? Okay. Well, first off is the easy way. You start off with direct callouts. So direct callouts, you know, marketing one-on-one. Say who your thing is for. We love saying, you know, attention plumbers, attention business owners, attention label that our ideal customers will identify with and be like, wow, that is for me. Now we used to do that in our business. We target business owners who do anywhere from, you know, £100,000 a year on the low end to many millions of pounds a year on the high end. That is a really broad spectrum of people, and within that there's all sorts of micro niches. And so what we do now is instead of just saying business owners, is we create a bunch of different ads that have specific callouts like plumbers, and we'll include plumbing in the headline as well. And so what we do, what I recommend you do, is actually decide on what are your micro niches. Are they specific job titles? Are they specific situational elements like the phases someone might be in or specific problems someone will have of being at a certain stage and reference them in your ad copy? Because in the ad copy and even in the ad creative itself, the algorithm will look at it and it will know to show the ad to that type of person. So here's what we do. We just create ads for all sorts of different industries and niches. All in the same ad set, and then boom, we run it. And each of these ads is now being shown to these particular people. And so what happens is you immediately start to discover pockets that are very effective, like plumbers, and pockets that are very not very effective, like marketing agencies. And so what we do is we do this as a test inside one ad set, and then when we have got some data, we'll then be like, okay, well, mortgage brokers is working great, so let's launch them as its own campaign. And as you can see here, against our target of £88 from the old ad set, the more specific one targeting mortgage brokers, hey ho, £26. That's like 25% of the cost, all from just making it specific, not actually changing anything in the image itself. So direct, specific callouts, number one. Next up, you want to make sure you're actually featuring your ICP in the ads because the algorithm is looking at the images, listening and watching the video, and it is painting a picture of context as to who this person is. Basic psychological principle 101 is that we tend to respond to imagery and videos of people that are similar to us, that we perceive are in our peer group bracket, whatever you want to call it. And so in our ads, we want to make sure our imagery and video reflects who the ideal customer is because they are therefore more likely to respond. And so we did some really interesting studies with this. What we discovered was that in my agency, when we had a bunch of, uh, awesome team members who were all very young, you know, fresh outta university, we would get them involved and they would take pictures and be in the ad creative for some of our clients. The challenge was if we had a bunch of my team who were all in their early 20s in the ads, but the target demographic of the clients who these ads were for was actually in their 50s and 60s, then there's just a bit of a mismatch. And all of a sudden they don't convert quite as well because people see all these really young people and we kind of switch off to it because they're of a different generation, a different core demographic, and therefore that's not that relevant to me. And so we did a proper test on this. We spent about 15 grand on this test and we tested old versus young. And so what we did was 2 ad sets. All the settings were exactly the same. Genders were the same, age range was completely open, 18 to 65. The only thing that was different is the young ad set had images of us as young people, and the old ad set had the same images, but we applied an ageifying filter, so it made us look old. And we wanted to see how that would affect the delivery of the ads and indeed the results. And what happened? Well, it was very interesting. Firstly, the young ones actually totally bombed. We spent like £1,500 and got literally no results. The old ones, however, absolutely crushed it. Context here for this particular funnel, target was £200 cost per purchase. This is getting £135 cost per purchase. We were very pleased. Again, the click-through rate, which was actually super low in general, but as you can see, the old was twice, 2 times higher than the young because again, that was the core demographic of this business and that resonated with them. What's kind of funny here, you can see the ads. This is the, this is the young version. This is the old version. Not even that much difference, you know, to be honest. But you can see the little old filter that was placed on here. So get your ICP in there. That has a big impact. Thirdly, then you got to focus on qualium. Yes, you heard that correct. So qualium is the merging of quality and volume because we all know there's a direct correlation between the volume of creative produced and tested and the volume of results that you get. However, we always made a sacrifice and we would always be willing to do more volume and sacrifice quality a little bit because we were only humans and we only have so much capacity. But obviously we live in the AI empowered age and so we are now able to use technology to significantly boost and increase the volume of ad creatives that we put out there. And that is awesome. But this is where the name of the game changes. We have got to be careful. Of producing slop. Slop, which is now the word of 2025, as AI slop has been so prevalent. We cannot produce AI slop. We've seen a really massive impact in the number of conversions from AI-produced ad copy recently. It's gone off a cliff and it is because all good marketing and advertising is pattern interrupts. A couple of years ago, AI-generated stuff was a pattern interrupt. It was unique and therefore it worked. Nowadays everyone's using it. Everyone is developing a filter for AI patterns that emerge in copy and imagery and videos. And as a result, it's falling flat. It's no longer a pattern interrupt and is ceasing to be effective right now. And so you gotta stay clear of the slop. You gotta inject your own human creativity and not fall victim to that. And don't sacrifice the quality in our chase of volume. But the more we do, the higher quality is, boom, we are in for a good treat. And we always have this saying that the best ads don't look like ads. And that is true. However, there has been a key nuance shift in this philosophy, and that is that the best ads now look like great organic content. Yes, you see, they look like fantastic pieces of content that somebody would want to consume on that platform anyway. And so we had a great taste of this recently where we launched this skit ad where Adam from our Genie AI demo team filmed this great little ad where he walks into one of our office meeting rooms and is having a conversation basically with himself. And he's basically pretending to be a business owner and a marketer who's discovered Genie AI. And it's a little back and forth. It's kind of funny, but mainly just a decent conversation. And this little sucker went absolutely nuts. This went so viral. And so you can see here from our tracking platform, this shows the number of calls booked. We launched it on April 27th. And then within 3 days it 3x the number of calls from this particular ad set, which was fantastic. And the main reason was people were stopping and watching because it looked like a native engaging piece of content and it was kind of interesting, but then it segued into our product at the end. So it's a beautiful wrapper. Next up though, we have Yapmaxing, another emerging trend where people are so sick of highly produced scripted stuff. And instead, they are now defaulting and engaging with all the stuff that is way more human. And so yap maxing is the art of picking up your camera and just yapping, a little bit like these videos. These are semi-scripted, as I make my little notes on the iPad first for sure, but then there's no script here. I'm just talking to you and I'm just chatting, and hopefully you find that a bit more authentic, a bit more real, rather than reading off a teleprompter. And so how to succeed with yap maxing? Well, first of all, you want to shoot selfie videos on your phone. So pulling out your phone, going for a walk, shooting a selfie video. I will say, for ads, we do script the hooks because the hooks are still very important, and then we just yap the rest. So once you've got the hook, bang, we yap the rest. Happy days. Now, this is 4 screenshots from some of our most successful ads recently. This is Nigel, and every time he goes away, we ask him to film a bunch of ads. And so here he is in the streets of Seville a few weeks ago, and he was just walking along, filming, yapping, and these were some of the best performing ads that we have got because they're interesting, they're engaging, but they're human and they drive fantastic results. Pillar number 2, structure. We understand creative is important, but how do we actually structure it in our ad account? How have the physical campaign strategies changed? Gone are the days of having loads of different audiences and quite advanced campaign setups with loads of campaigns and ad sets. We live in an age of consolidation, which simply means less is more. And so we use two primary methods now. The first is called test and scale. Test and scale. Who would have thought you have a testing campaign and a scaling campaign? The idea here is you add a bunch of your ads into the testing campaign and you spend some money there. As ads start to work or not work, you then either turn them off Or if they do work, say, huzzah, let's pull that out, turn it off and add it into our scaling campaign. The goal here is to get, you know, 4 to 5 ads in the scaling campaign as soon as possible and then continually test because what you'll see, this algorithm is very aggressive. When you have 20 ads in an ad set, it will slam all of the budget to like 1 or 2 ads. And that is annoying. It's great if the ad is working, but it's bad if the ad is not. And so we want to quickly turn them off, move the good performing ads into the scaling campaign so we can spend more budget there and then turn them off in the testing campaign. So the other ads can actually be tested. And so you end up with this nice little cyclical model where you're spending 80% of your budget on scaling and only 20% on testing. But the testing is constantly generating new winners for you. So as the ads in the scaling campaign inevitably fatigue, boom, they're replaced. The second method is what we call the isolation method. I got to be honest, most media buyers, they suck. They do not take a scientific approach to their testing. And I think that's bad because yes, in marketing, things that work are very rare and it actually takes a very long time to find stuff that does work. And one of the reasons people spin the wheels and don't make much progress with their marketing is they never lock in concrete insights as to what their audience is responding to. And as a result, they do all this marketing and every single time it's just their guesses, their assumptions, their opinions. It's a roll of the dice. So we want to take a scientific approach. And so what most people do is they write a bunch of headlines, ad copies, creatives, and then create a campaign that basically has them all mixed together. And you make a bunch of ads with all these different combinations and then set them loose. Some of them work, some of them don't work, but you get no concrete insight into what actually caused the results to occur. So this is where, where the isolation method comes in. You see, the isolation method says we are going to isolate the variable that we want to test and we're going to run a very small test over a short period to identify which version of the headline, which version of the ad copy, which version of the creative actually won. So what we will do is if we're going to test headlines, we will test all the headlines with the same ad copy and the same creative. We won't change anything but the variable we are testing. A true scientific test. Now what we do is we set up automated rules in Meta, typically for 1,500 impressions, and we turn it off And so what this means is for a very small chunk of budget in 24 hours, you can test 20 ads and it'll all be shown to 1,500 people roughly, and it'll all be turned off. And you'll then be able to compare them based on cost per result if you're getting leads at a low cost per lead, but mainly the unique click-through rate. Because yes, unique click-through rate is not an end conversion, but it's a great proxy signal for how scroll-stopping appealing was this ad. And then we know based on the rankings, what element, you know, what particular headline worked well. And we can then be like, great, let's lock that sucker in. And now let's test the ad copies. So from testing the ad copies, you guessed it, I've got the same headline and creative. It is the ad copy that will be different, and so on and so forth. And so what we do in brand new accounts, because we typically do this when we're not sure if the angle is going to work, if it's a brand new funnel, if we don't have a really strong degree of probability. We run that, identify some winners. It takes like 48 hours, and then we take the winners and we put it into a dynamic creative. Dynamic creative being the setting where we have one single ad that has got 10 different creatives, bunch of different ad copies, bunch of different headlines. And what Meta is doing is mixing them all together, showing the best variants to people that it believes has the highest chance of converting. And that works great when it's been fed with stuff that is good. If you feed it stuff that is rubbish, then you're going to get rubbish stuff. So pillar number 1, creative, tick. Pillar number 2, campaign structure. Keep it simple. Testing, scaling, or do the isolation method, whatever floats your boat. So that brings us to pillar number 3. What is pillar number 3? Well, pillar number 3 is data. The least sexy of all the pillars, but nonetheless incredibly important. As I said, we're in this algorithmic age. What do algorithms eat for breakfast? Data signals. It is only as good as the fuel that we feed this little guy. And this guy, he's very hungry. The data signals that we feed the algorithm affect our targeting because it's going to look at who is converting and based on who's converting, buy more of them. So it's going to massively skew who it goes after. It massively affects our CPMs, our cost per 1000 impressions. And so this is critical because if our pixel is not receiving enough conversion events at a nice steady cadence, then Meta thinks, what the heck is going on? Meta values its users above our advertising dollars is the truth. Advertising is a necessary evil. And so it runs ads purely because it needs money and it therefore only wants to try and show ads that are good to the user. Because if your ad is bad and giving someone a negative experience, that will lower their chances of coming back to Meta, and that is bad. And therefore Meta will penalize you and charge you more. On the flip side, if your ad is good and it's getting lots of good engagement, and when people go to your website, they actually take conversion actions which are sent back to Facebook, that signals, wow, they got what they wanted. That was a good ad. We're going to show that to more people, and Facebook's going to reward you with lower CPMs. Now, lower CPMs are great because they are right at the top of the Facebook funnel. You know, people have to see your ad before they can click it, before they can view your landing page, before they can opt in and convert and so on and so forth. So the cheaper that is, the cheaper all everything beneath that— your cost per click, your cost per lead, cost per sale, everything, everything gets better with a lower CPM and having proper data set up and going through to it. It's just a hack that is going to enable you to leverage that. And then finally, it affects your lead quality. So this is building on the targeting, but who is triggering the conversion event? Is feeding the algorithm with a clear data profile. And so if that profile is of people that are unqualified that we don't actually want, then that's bad because it's going to find way more of those people. So we want to set it up in a right way. So there are 3 key pillars when it comes to setting up the data properly. Number 1 is the Conversion API. This is the server-side tracking. Not going to go into it in this video. You've got to get it set up. It's really easy these days with Zapier, with tools like Genie AI. GoHighLevel and so on and so forth. But you need this sucker because otherwise all of your pixel tracking or a massive chunk of it is not being received because of ad blockers, because of Apple privacy settings and so on and so forth. Second up is pixel conditioning. You know, this has such a big impact. When we first implemented this, we saw our percentage of qualified leads basically grow by like an actual 2% every single week. So it basically went from like 20% to 22%, 24%, 26%. For like 10 weeks straight, a steady, like, actual 2% increase. And all we do with the pixel conditioning is have some kind of qualifying question in our form. And when people submit it, they go to one or two thank you pages. Now, thank you page A is where they go if they are qualified. And on that thank you page, we track them and we send the data back to Facebook. And so if they're unqualified and they go to thank you page B, then we don't track them. The pixel is not there. So we are selective in the data we send back. And as a result, the pixel optimizes for the good people. And hey presto, we get good people. Finally, value-based optimization. So this comes in two forms. If you're selling stuff, then you can obviously optimize towards people that spend the most and that revenue is tracked in your accounts. But if you're a lead generation company, you can actually still implement value-based optimization, which is telling the algorithm to optimize based on the value of an event rather than just the number of events. And what we can do is we can create a spectrum. So as we qualify them, we might have, let's say, 3 questions. And for each question they answer that is qualified, we might give them +10 points, just an arbitrary value. And so if you answer all 3, you'd be +30. If you answer 2, you'd be +20, and so on. Now that data can be fed into Meta and we can say, look, this was a 30-point lead versus a 20-point lead versus a 0-point lead. and it will use that figure to optimize and give you better people as well. So slightly more advanced, but a very good strategy as well. So those encompass the 3 core pillars of Meta ads in 2026: the creative, the structure, and the data. And so I hope you found this very useful. I hope that you are able to deploy some of these strategies to start seeing some killer results. We drop videos like this every single week. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to like and subscribe. That's all from me for now. Peace.