$367,000 dollars later this is how you run meta ads
Jay, a real-estate wholesaler, breaks down what he learned spending $367,000 on Meta ads. Train your pixel on your ideal customer profile so it stops bringing garbage leads. Test dozens of creatives at once, not a few, and track everything or you'll miss why your volume drops.
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What's going on, boys and girls? After months and months of being asked through my TikTok, my YouTube, my Instagram to talk about ads, the video is finally here. I'm going to be sharing some of the costly mistakes that I've gone through, some of the learning lessons, some of the best practices, and some of the best ways to start running ads in 2026. That way you guys don't have to go through the learning curve, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn what I've learned from my own personal experience. If this is the first time you're watching one of my YouTube videos, welcome! My name is Jay. I've been wholesaling real estate for the past 7 years, and I make content just like this to help you start or scale your wholesale business. If you like this type of content, like, comment, subscribe, and let's get into the video. One of the things that I hated when learning ads was how much people overcomplicated it on YouTube videos, even in programs that I paid $5,000, $10,000 to learn from. Everything is overcomplicated. So this video is going to be as simplified as possible to get you to understand this as soon as possible. One of the first lessons that I've learned is pixel conditioning. Your pixel is the brain of the ad account. If we're talking about simplest example possible, our own personal brain performs at the best when it has the right amount of sleep, the the right nutrition, the right environment, the right people, the right learning, the right environment, right? So that is what we need for us to perform at the best ability possible. What do we need to make sure our pixel performs at the best ability possible for the ad account? We need to feed it the right information. We need to condition it so it only works when the right people come through our funnel, when the right people come through our ad. Because the whole point of running ads is to target a specific type of person, and that specific type of person that we're targeting is called our IC. ICP, our individual customer profile. That ICP is the person that we can help from our service. I'm a wholesaler. I want to reach people that are having pain points with owning a property that they want to get rid of fast. So my ads have to be simple. My ads have to be— if I'm targeting a tired landlord, would be, hey, if you have a property that you're tired of managing, you're tired of tenants, you're tired of late payments, you're tired of, uh, property management companies, you're tired of the returns that, that were overpromised to you and you want to sell your house for cash, click below. How simple that ad is. Facebook is going to try its best to target that specific type of person at a specific ICP, the perfect tired landlord, to come through my funnel and get offered my solution. Now the problem that a lot of people go through, including myself, was that I did not condition my pixel properly. Therefore, I had a bunch of people outside of my ICP, outside of my individual customer profile, coming through my funnel, coming through my ads. Therefore, I had to force conversions, meaning that The ideal person that was coming through my funnel was not coming through it because my pixel was not conditioned the right way. How do we fix this and how do we avoid having an unconditioned pixel that is firing off with our bad people? We wanna make sure our ads is as simple as possible. If you're trying to reach roofers, you wanna say something like, hey, if you're a roofer making 6 figures a month and you want more leads, click below. If you're a wholesaler and you're struggling to close deals, click below. If you're a tired landlord and you wanna get rid of your property fast for cash, click below. If you have a property that you inherited, Click below. These are all different ICPs that I've used in my ads to make sure it's as simple as possible, as targeted as possible, so that way those right people, the right ICP, are coming through my funnel. That way they get offered my solution. The whole point of running ads is to target a specific person. If you're not targeting that person with simple copywriting in your ad creative, you're going to be pretty much conditioning your pixel for bullshit, right? Which is one thing that I did when I first started off. I didn't condition my pixel at all. I didn't have anything firing when the right people were coming through. So everybody was coming through. My brain of my ad account was thinking, oh, all these people are good. Let's keep targeting this big broad of people that are not this guy's ICP because, hey, we don't know any better because this guy's not feeding us back the right information to know who is the ICP that this person wants, right? Therefore, I was not profitable because I was not bringing in the right people through my ad account. So the first lesson is conditioning your pixel in a Facebook dataset to only fire when your ICP is met, when the right person is coming through your ads into your database. My second point: tracking is the livelihood of your business. Tracking is the blood flow of your business. If you are not tracking, especially when you're spending your hard-earned dollars on ads, will cause you to fail miserably. You will lose a shit ton of money. Why am I so confident? Why am I so energetic about this? Because I've lost so much money on ads not tracking the right way. I would I don't even want to talk about it because I'm going to get fucking mad. But tracking is so important because it's— you're able to literally see where the bottleneck is, right? Because anybody can run ads for a month, anybody can run ads for a couple weeks and be profitable and have crazy results. But at scale, you're gonna have bottlenecks. And if you're not tracking the information, you are going to fail because you're not going to know where the bottleneck is coming from and how to solve the bottleneck. Therefore, let me give you an example. Month 1, you get 60 leads. Great, amazing. Your ICP is dialed. You've got a bunch of conversions, you've got a bunch of contracts signed. You're living life, right? It's great. You think you found the money glitch. Then the second month comes by and you only get 30 leads with the same amount of spend. There's a bottleneck. You don't know if it's your landing page. You don't know if your ads are burnt out. You don't know if it's the ad creative. You don't know if it's the targeting. You don't know if it's a new Facebook update. You don't know if it's a sales problem. You have to be tracking these things. Otherwise you are going to be lost in the sauce. You're gonna be burning money through ads, and Facebook doesn't care. They will still charge your card even if you're losing money. So you have to take full responsibility, have an overlook of the business, and make sure you're tracking every single metric so you know, hey, when something goes wrong, I can solve the problem like this and not be lost in the sauce. Now, this is a more recent update, a more recent learning lesson, is about volume. You need to have volume when testing ad creatives. If you just launch 2 or 3 ads, it's gonna be very hard for you to find a winning ad just from that data set. Because you're limited, right? You're limited on spend. You're limited on reach. You're limited on testing capability. But let's say on the other hand, you're launching 30 creatives, 40 creatives, which some people might think is overkill. I think it's just fine because you're going to have a higher chance, higher probability of finding a winning creative and then being able to test from there. From a small pool, you're going to have very limited reach. You're going to have very limited testing capabilities because you're testing a very small amount of ad creatives.. It takes a lot of testing to find a winning creative, and then from there it takes even more testing to optimize that creative to be successful at a bigger rate. Make sure you do not stay small when testing creatives. It is free to test creatives. It is free to sit there and launch a bunch of ads, and it's going to be easier for you to spend money profitably when you have a big pool to test from and you know exactly which ones are bringing you the best results possible. Now this last one is a bit controversial between different marketers, but it's CBO versus ABO. CBO is campaign budget optimization, meaning you're letting Facebook pretty much take control and see which ad is going to give you the best result possible based on Facebook's metrics. Therefore, it's better for short-term. If you just want leads fast, CBO is the way to go. If you want long-term testing ability, if you want long-term sustained results and long-term better metrics for your own personal business, you want to do ABO, ad set budget optimization. Let me give you an example. CBO, you put in, I don't know, 10 creatives in there. Facebook is going to see which one is going to be the best one that's bringing you the most results and spend the most on one specific ad. It's not going to be equal distribution versus ABO. It is more long-term. It takes a little bit more money to spend, but it's easier to test. It's easier to see which one is actually performing the best according to your metrics. CBO is short-term. ABO is long-term. ABO, you're setting different campaigns to test against each other to see which one actually performs the best. Now CBO is cheaper, gets you leads faster. ABO is more long-term, more expensive, but it is better long-term. So I think I explained it in the most simple way possible. CBO, short-term, fast results, short-term, very short-term. ABO, long-term, more expensive, but better results long-term, long-term. CBO, short-term, ABO, long-term. I hope that video helped. If you guys liked this video, like, comment, subscribe. If you guys want more ad videos, comment down below, let me know. I'm more than willing to shoot way more of these and give you guys more sauce that I've learned from spending a shit ton of money on ads, losing a lot of money, making a lot of money, buying so many courses. I would love to share that experience. And if you guys want me to run your ads for you, for your wholesale company for the next 4 months, we do everything for you. We set the campaigns, we do all the creative testing, we set up your website, literally everything. All you have to do is pick up the phone when the leads call you and close, then reach out to me. The link is down below. Reach out to me on Instagram and we'll go from there. I hope you guys have a very, very well 2026, and hopefully we close a lot of deals together. I'll see you guys in the next one.
