Someone who manages $1 million monthly in Facebook ad spend walks through five checks for high CPMs: creative fatigue (rising frequency, falling clicks), weak hooks (try problem-solution, story, social proof angles), narrow audiences (go broad with exclusions instead), landing page copy that breaks Facebook rules, and campaign structure (fewer ad sets, bigger daily budgets). Start with fresh creatives and audience exclusions.
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If you're struggling with high costs or high CPMs inside of your ad account, this video is going to give you 5 checks that you can look at in your ad account today to fix those problems. This is backed around $1 million of ad spend every single month that we manage for clients and ourselves. And so it's going to be really tactical. I hope you get a lot out of it. Let's get right into it. First things first is I just want to give some context. CPM is really just a diagnostic. It's not the whole scoreboard. Your profit, your CPA, your cost per lead, those things matter a lot more. So don't get obsessed with trying to lower the cost per 1,000 impressions if your AOV is really good, if your profits are there. But if you're doing really well and you're trying to improve things, that's fine. But don't take it as the whole scoreboard. It's just a diagnostic. So make sure you take that into account. First things first, we're going to look at is creative fatigue. How can you identify this? The first way and easiest way to do this is if your frequency is up and your click-through rate is down. That's basically showing you that the audience is bored and they fatigued a lot of the creative that you're showing. Easy way to fix it is obviously creative volume, but also a restructuring can make a very, very big difference. So in this ad account that I'm showing here as an example, we actually had this situation happen. So you can see this is over the past— this is just this month so far. If I back up even into April, we had these ads running, and at first, like within the first 2 to 3 sales, things were going really well. And even this one right here is still on and it's still doing well and it's profitable for us. But you can see that CPMs are pretty expensive here, cost per purchase is a little higher, and our frequency is at 2. Only thing we changed is we duplicated this with some new creatives and we threw in some exclusions exclusions. We excluded everyone over the past 180 days that interacted with us in any way, shape, or form. Pretty much overnight, and even at decent spend so far, frequency is a lot better, cost per purchase has been cut down by almost $10, and the CPM has been cut down by over $50, which is great. Really simple change, doesn't take a lot to do that. And that's the first check that you can do. The second check is having a weak hook. If you have generic ads and they're getting ignored, that's giving weak signals to the algorithm, and it's going to punish you with higher CPMs. So this just comes down to building in a really good system that actually creates good hooks. I filmed tons of other videos around that, but I think one of the easiest things that you can do to make good hooks is to follow this very simple structure. So there's a few different ways that you can actually group them together. First is by creative angles. You can look at if you have a problem-solution framework, a personal story or a narrative, social proof, us versus them, or more offer-based ads. And then from that, you can pair those angles with different styles to give you a lot of variation. So you're getting out of those generic ads and you stop getting ignored by Facebook's system. And then we take it even deeper. We could even go to more angles here as well. Demonstration, myth-busting, educational, pattern interrupt. If you basically just took 5 of these angles in 5 of these styles and mix them together, you'll have 10 different kinds of creatives, maybe even more than that. Ton of different angles, tons of different styles, and you'll get out of that rut that you're in. If you're having trouble with coming up with new ad creative to combat CPMs, check out some of the other videos that I've done on my YouTube channel. It'll show you exactly how to make a ton of creatives with AI in a really, really neat way. So easy check to do. But it's gonna take a little bit more work. The 3rd check you can do is around your audiences. And if your audiences are too narrow or too competitive, or there's mismatch targeting to your actual offer, that's something that could be causing issues. And I really recommend almost all ad accounts to start with really broad targeting. You can see here in these ads that are doing really well for us, everything is broad. The only kind of targeting layer we have is exclusions. So keep that in mind, broader the better. And if there's some kind of mismatch, be careful of that. Make sure your ad is very specific to who you're going after while also being interesting. Fourth check you can do is your actual landing page. Something could be wrong after the click. Now Facebook, what I've been noticing is that they will actually punish you if your landing page isn't really as kosher as they want it to be. If you have too crazy claims or if there's something that's too outside of their kind of ideal scope for what you should be advertising for, they're gonna punish you with high CPMs. So make sure you read through it, doesn't sound too scammy, doesn't sound too crazy or unbelievable. Even if the copy is good, they're gonna punish you on CPMs and you might be in actually more problems than better results just with some cool copywriting, right? And last but not least, structure. I've done a lot of videos on structure as well, but too many ad sets, too little budget, and too many changes is going to result in high CPMs. This is a structure that's worked so well for us, having new ad sets. Every time we launch a new ad set, we launch it with a pack of new creatives and we let Facebook kind of do the work, but we also supply it with enough spend so it can actually do the job. If you're doing like 5, 6 ad creatives and you're giving it $20 a day, it's not going to work. You need to make sure that your budget is scaling and you're giving Facebook enough budget or else it's not going to work. And then also be careful not to change too many things at once. I just gave you 5 things to go through and adjust, but if you're doing too many of these at once, you're not going to know what actually worked. So make sure you diagnose in order. Don't rebuild everything randomly. Start with one thing at a time. I think the highest lever thing that you can do is really look at the creative fatigue and then look at audience exclusions. If you start with those 2 things, I think you'll be in good shape. Let me know if this video helped. I hope you enjoyed it. You can click below to join our school group where we give tons of marketing advice, templates, frameworks, everything that you need to be a successful media buyer or marketer, and I'll see you in the next video.
