In this tutorial Zach Oldham, founder of Flax Labs, walks e‑commerce advertisers through a repeatable framework for building profitable ad campaigns in 2023. He begins by emphasizing the need for a clear, goal‑driven testing phase, where the advertiser defines a target cost‑per‑acquisition (CPA) based on product price, margins, and desired profit. Budget recommendations are tied to the CPA (0.5‑1× for minimal tests, 2‑2.5× for rapid validation). Oldham then shifts to leveraging the video‑view objective on Meta platforms, creating custom audiences segmented by how much of a video a user watched (3 seconds, 25 %, 50 %, etc.) and retargeting those warm viewers with conversion‑focused ads. He stresses the importance of the first‑few‑seconds hook, recommending multiple hook variations and using the 3‑second view‑rate (views ÷ impressions) as a quality metric. The next pillar is objection‑based retargeting: identifying the top buyer concerns—shipping cost/times, price, and social proof—and crafting creative (UGC, testimonials) that directly addresses each. He advises mining both own and competitor reviews (including Amazon) to surface these objections. Finally, Oldham invites viewer feedback on content format. The video delivers a step‑by‑step, data‑driven playbook for testing, audience building, creative optimization, and retargeting in modern e‑commerce advertising.
Chapters
Since the update, there are quite a few things that you need to do to have successful advertising campaigns. I'm Zach, I run a company called Flax Labs and we spend millions and millions of dollars on the advertising platforms. In this video, I'm going to run you through a few different profitable ad strategies and setups that you can use in order to have successful ads in 2023. As we all know, the world of marketing is constantly changing, especially e-commerce. E-commerce advertising and marketing is one of the fastest adapting industries in the world. And since there isn't one effective marketing plan that works for all businesses, you need to combine a series of different tactics and strategies in order to figure out what works successfully for your brand or business. The question is, how exactly do you do that? And in this video, I'll explain. So let's talk about step 1, which is testing. First things first, you need to consider what your ad is attempting to accomplish. The goal should be to have a distinct vision of success before you can evaluate how your ad is performing. In doing this, You should be able to eliminate all emotion and feeling from the analysis of your advertising. Now, in your testing phase, you're essentially figuring out if your ad or your strategy, your targeting is something that is actually scalable and profitable. If you don't want to stretch your testing phase, then you need to spend more money. So you need higher budgets. Using a higher budget will get you test results much faster. In order to determine budget, you need to ask yourself, what is my main goal? What is my— target cost per acquisition. If you don't already have a predetermined cost per acquisition target for your brand, then this is how you figure it out. Take a look at your selling point or the amount on average that people spend. So either your average order value, and if you don't have average order value data, then just the average selling price for the product that you're attempting to sell. For example's sake, let's say you're selling a $100 product now with cost of goods payment processing, shipping and handling. Let's say it costs you $30. So you have $70 left over. That would be a 70% gross margin. You now have $70 left over to spend on ads. But of course you want some of that to be left over for profit. You can now determine what your target profit margin is. Let's say that your target profit margin or your target gross margin is $30 or 30%. That means that essentially you need to be able to get an acquisition for $40 or less. $100 minus $30 for COGS, payment processing, shipping and handling, minus $40 for cost per acquisition leaves you with $30 gross profit. The general testing rule of thumb that we follow at Flax is to run a budget up to 2 to 2.5x target CPA as a daily budget. So if my target CPA is $40, we spend between $80 to $100 per day to verify a strategy or a test. We do this to get answers very quickly. That means that we have data within within 24 hours, and when we're working with large client budgets, we're not wasting their time. Your minimum budget should be no less than 0.5x to 1x your target CPA. So for a $40 target, spend $20 to $40 as a daily budget on a certain test. Most of the time you don't need to wait till you've spent 2 to 2.5x CPA in order to figure out if an ad is working or not. If the CTR is low, the CPC is incredibly high, and it looks like it's not really getting any engagement, then it's likely not a winner. However, if you think the ad is exceptionally good and should have performed, then you can retest the full ad following the same set of rules. The next step or strategy that I'm going to talk about is leveraging video views. As we all know, the pixel strategy is no longer as effective as it used to be. This comes after the iOS 14 update on their privacy policy. This means that your website audiences based on website page views on your website won't be as accurate as they should be. However, we still have 100% transparency or we get 100% of the data on any on-Facebook or on-Meta campaigns that we run. So that would be engagements, likes, DMs, and video view campaigns or objectives in Facebook. The way we use video views as an objective or as a strategy at Flax Labs is by taking the video views audience or people that have viewed videos that we've run as ads and we break those into our own custom audiences. We look at the top of funnel videos and the retargeting videos and we retarget them over a short period of time. For example, we might take the top of funnel video and retarget video viewers in the last 7 to 14 days. This creates room for a warm audience. This is very lukewarm, by the way. By definition, these people have seen an ad before, but they might not have necessarily visited a website or added to cart. We hammer retargeting to people that have watched a video all the way through. Through. So if you're not familiar, you can retarget or create audiences based on how much of a certain video somebody has watched on Facebook. You can target based on whether they've watched the first 3 seconds, 25%, 50%, 75%, 95%, and 100% of the video. Videos are incredibly important when it comes to your advertising strategy. We use this strategy to get incredibly cheap reach. From people. The video views objective costs almost nothing, and we can get a lot of people viewing a video. If somebody watches, for example, 50%, 75%, 95% of a video, we know that they're likely interested in the product, and that's when we retarget them with an actual conversions campaign. This allows us to get higher returns on our conversion campaigns as people are familiar with the content already and also interested in it. When it comes to running a video, all that matters is the first few seconds or the hook. When we're running video ads, our video and content team is creating 4 to 5 different variations of every hook so that we have different hooks to test and so that we can find the best pairing of hook and video ad content. A great metric you can use to see how well your videos are performing is looking at the 3-second video view rate and dividing that by the amount of impressions you have. That will give you a percentage as to how many people made it to the first 3 seconds out of everybody watching the video. Your goal on any video ad or any hook that you're testing is to have the highest percentage of people make it past the first 3 seconds. That will then verify that the hook that you're using on a specific video is high quality. The next section, strategy, category that I want to talk about is retargeting. When you're retargeting, you need to be addressing the buyer's main objections. Some of the main objections involve delivery cost and shipping times, product pricing and cost, and social proof credibility. So how long is the product going to take to ship to me? How much does it actually cost? And is that price too high? And are there other people out there that have had good experiences with this product? Is there good feedback? And the way that you overcome those objections is with content like UGC reviews, testimonials from other people. Your goal with retargeting is to discover your prospect buyer's main objection and then target them with ads that help them overcome that objection. Easy way to discover your customers' main objections is through the reviews that they leave you and your brand. I also strongly suggest checking out your competitors' reviews and feedback, as this is a really easy way of getting insight into what's working and what's not. If you yourself don't have a ton of reviews, then you can rely on competitor reviews and you can also check out places like Amazon as they typically have a lot of reviews and it's very transparent that you can essentially figure out what people don't like about your competitors and hyperfocus on those objections or elements and use them in your marketing. Aside from just your retargeting as well, understand where your competitors are going wrong and how you can frame your brand differently to them. All of this analysis will help you stand out from the pack and actually differentiate yourself in the market. Now, I know our video styles are slightly different. The information we talk about is slightly different. But I'd love to know from you guys what you would like to see in terms of breakdowns, explanations of ad accounts, and the structure of these videos. Are they helpful? Are they unhelpful? Is there more information that you need to see? Would you like screen shares and actual physical breakdowns of some of the stuff that I'm talking about as examples? So let me know that in the comments. Thanks for watching.
