👋 Hey fam!

I'm really excited to share this 👊 Wednesday roundup with you!

Another Add Creative is out and get ready for 50 minutes of pure value. Pop inside the brain of Adam Robinson (CEO of Retention.com) as he shares his inspiring journey as a founder, what got him started on the path of building a massive business, and the traps he’s fallen into a long the way. This is an incredible one.

We also get a chance to learn about DPA ads from a master Dan Pantelo (CEO of Marpipe) breaks down the fundamentals of why DPA matters and what strategy you should be employing to leverage them.

We learn a few things from our experts about new ad styles and CRO fundamentals from our experts!

Also, make sure to sign-up for the Rockerbox event THIS WEEK to learn about what’s working in paid marketing (😉 it’s free)

Hope your ads are scaling and LTV is 📈!

Cheers,

Chase

Starting using Pencil to Create winning ads 10x faster with AI.

Special Tip:

Stop running cryptic creative.

I watch so many ads & have NO idea what they were for.

If your customer leaves your video wondering what they just watched Then it’s a terrible advert.

Courtesy of Fraser Cottrell

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Marketing agencies, freelance creatives, and e-comm experts…want access to our generous revenue share and co-marketing opportunities? Become a Pencil Partner today! You can learn more here.

🎙Add Creative

Come hang with Adam Robinson and about what it means to build a unicorn in public - all the good, bad, and ugly. He doesn’t shy away from his mistakes but his unbreakable spirit shines through and makes you believe that he will achieve his vision. 🚀

I hope you enjoy it!

 Spotify 🎧

Guest Content 👑 🐐

By Dan Pantelo from Marpipe

Bringing Humanity To DPA Ads - Part 1

If you’re like me, you also thought that DPA had no role to play in the conversation about creative. I mean for god’s sake, 99% of DPA looks like this…

For those who might be new to it - most ad platforms allow you to plug in your live product catalog and run the product images (yes, the same ones from your product pages) as ads.

Miraculously, this ‘ad creative’ (if you can call it that) can perform extremely well because by ingesting your catalog, platforms like Meta learn a ton about your product SKUs, which allows them to target people with high intent looking for similar products.

In fact, DPA can work SO well that many are shocked when they find out just how popular it really is - DPA already accounts for about 1/4th of all digital ads on paid social (that’s about $43 billion worth of DPA)…

In the ecomm category alone, Meta reports that DPA is almost 70% of all ad spend.

So why does it feel like everybody is doing it, but nobody is talking about it? Can creative strategy play a role in DPA? When’s the last time we discussed DPA strategy?

Is DPA strategy even a thing?

I audited over 100 DPA campaigns, here’s what to know…

Most brands are bad at DPA - plain and simple. 💸

At Marpipe, we see hundreds of brands upload their feeds to our app so we have a court-side seat to this phenomenon. The few brands who are good at DPA tend to spend over 90% of their ad spend on it and tend to have very high ad spend.

How do you know if you’re good at DPA?

Introducing DPA Strategy - we’ve identified 3 major pillars behind DPA success. If you’re doing these things, then you’re good at DPA.

1. Feed Setup & Maintenance

Picture this: a spreadsheet that holds the key to your product truth. But it needs constant love and attention.

Is your source of product truth accurate, up-to-date, and optimized for upload to Meta? Most aren’t.

Cue the hero: Product Information Management Systems (PIMs)! They'll ingest data from your warehouses, POS systems, product suppliers, product photos, etc, and consolidate it in one place.

They’re built to handle the chaos and they’re easy to update. Once you've got a PIM setup, it becomes the source of truth that you plug it into your storefront CMS, third-party sales channels, and ad platforms.

Popular PIMs for e-commerce include ProductsUp and Feedonomics (not sponsored)

But even if your feed is accurate, updated, and optimized… uploading your feed to an ad platform can be more annoying than finding matching socks in the laundry.

Especially when the type of information in your feed can make or break its performance. Many DTC brands skip this step and rely on the direct Shopify <> Facebook integration (which actually doesn’t work well for DPA).

TLDR; brands that take feed management seriously have a large inherent advantage when it comes to DPA performance.

2. DPA Campaign Setup

There are new trends emerging when it comes to setting up DPA campaigns. The previous, out-dated setup looked something like this;

• You have one DPA campaign for retargeting only.

• You have another DPA in a different campaign for prospecting, commonly known as DABA (Dynamic Ads, Broad Audiences).

If your setup still looks like this, you’re missing out on taking advantage of new capabilities. Meta’s new Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC+) effectively remove ALL decision-making about targeting from your control, and allow you to lean entirely into the improved algorithm to determine who sees your ads.

Typically, people will throw a mix of creatives into ASC+ (static image ads, video UGC, DPA, etc) to see what performs best. And almost always, DPA dominates in ASC+. Yes, it’s true, DPA and ASC+ are best friends - and when they work together, the performance can be so good it reminds me of Facebook ads in 2016.

This covers off on both prospecting and retargeting as ASC+ will serve to whoever is most likely to buy, so it acts as a catch-all.

Meta is investing so much into improving ASC+ right now that brands who crack it early are getting a first-mover advantage.

Next is channel coverage - every major social platform accepts catalog uploads for DPA, including TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc.

Beyond that, platforms like Criteo and StackAdapt will allow you to access the programmatic open web.

By running your DPAs at low spend across other platforms, you’ll be scooping up easy conversion wins by having full coverage across both open web and the walled gardens.

 3. DPA Design & Testing

Ads are supposed to look good, right? DPA looks bad because it’s just the product image in your source feed. It has none of the visual variables that we all know drive engagement

Your DPA needs a serious makeover by incorporating design elements that we know move the needle - things like:

• Branding colors/logo

• Value prop copy

• Star ratings

• Testimonials

• Price strikethroughs

• "As seen in.." badges with your press

• "Buy Now Pay Later" price

There’s a well-documented list of creative variables that are proven to influence the performance of your DPA and are easy to include.

But how is it possible to have full design control over your DPA if the creative is the product images from your source feed?

Platforms like Stitcher and Marpipe are design tools that ingest your original product catalog and allow you to design new versions of your product images by making templates the same way you would design an image ad in Canva or Figma.

By taking full design control over your DPA, you have a whole new world of possibilities to experiment with, and you can use your creative insight as a performance lever for your DPA.

Even in the words of Meta, ”Creative is the new targeting”, and this is especially true with product ads.

In Part 2, we’ll break open the Pandora’s Box which is DPA creative strategy, and show you how you can win by bringing your brand’s personality into your product ads.

Why this matters: If Dan hasn’t changed your mind that DPA needs to be a part of your creative stack - then I don’t know if anything I can say will 😂

But I’ll give it a go. DPA is based on the algorithm. It is focused on surfacing the right product, to the right customer, at the right time.

Why not optimize the creative to be high performing creative?

Most of the creative process is to take this one ad for this one product and “hope” that it will work when you serve it to your customers. DPA is the opposite, the only caveat is the creative process hasn’t been disrupted until now.

This is an endorsement to open up the way you look at creative and make sure that IF you have more than 1 SKU you are leveraging DPA (with or without Marpipe) to diversify how you deliver value to your intended audience and hopefully make more money! (But also, use Marpipe 😂 #notpaid)

Expert Strategy + Learnings

Some amazing learnings from thought leaders in DTC.

Dylan's CRO Tips 🙌

When you find a new winning ad creative, look at your landing page and see what split test you can run to improve congruency.

Everyone knows "ad needs to match landing page" but this is an easy way to just start that process

For more 🔥 follow Dylan Ander.

Rahul's Paid Media Learnings 🤘

Your messaging should convey an understanding of the customer's problem.

Focus on building trust and the sale will follow.

Here's how we used a simple benefit-cost framework to help our client showcase their messaging:

Benefit-cost framework simply put is your product benefit + avoided cost. What is the benefit your product provided and what's the avoided cost I get when purchasing your product?

We'll walk through one of our clients that offers behavioral recommendations for diabetes treatment as our example. Their previous messaging was tailored around direct solutions and very broad messaging like: "Reduce your diabetes medication safely"

As a consumer who's in their 50s+, you can read into this in multiple ways. - Do I get more medication? - Am I getting on a diet plan? - Will I be getting a new device that helps me monitor my sugar? Very confusing and often misleading to the audience.

Narrow this down & simplify. What will you do for the consumer followed by the avoided cost of not having more medication. Keep it simple and tailor the messaging to your audience.

Here's what we changed it to:

Just by changing our messaging on our landing page, we saw an increase in conversion rate by 32%.

Provide your consumers with the simplest way to understand what your product does and how it helps them in the fastest way.

Follow Rahul and reach out to Reach Digital to work with him 🧠

Worth Your Time 🤌

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• Creative OS - if you love making ads on Figma, you'll love this.

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Fav Newsie's

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• Chew On This

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• Acquire Weekly

• Your Content Should Sell

• The Performers

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