Hey, Haveaclue! I hope you’re having a solid Q1!

It’s me, Barry AKA “UglyAd Daddy” according to at least one of you 👀

This should be an easier newsletter for everyone who runs ads on Meta, all about Meta’s FREE brand lift studies, the results I’m seeing, how to set them up yourself, some ugly ads helping us drive efficient sales and brand lift, and some common misconceptions about “brand awareness”.

Another upcoming topic I’m working on for you is Agency Fees: Retainer vs % of Spend. I’ve already written like 2000+ words on it, so smash the reply button right now and say “AGENCY FEES” if you want to me to hurry up and publish that soon and let me know if you have any questions about this topic you want to see me cover.

If at any point during this newsletter you learn something new or find something useful, it would mean the world to me if you could share that nugget with the world on Twitter/LinkedIn or in your Slack, or as a screenshot on Instagram and tag/mention me. Or forward this to someone you think might find this useful. Or just hit reply and say thanks!

Ok, let’s get into today’s topic:

How the heck can ugly ads drive sales and help my brand?

The answer is simple:

That’s it, really! You can shut this email here if that’s all you’re here for, buuuuuut I think you’ll want to stick around for the results, how to interpret them, and how you can set this test up for your brand for FREE right now, and some of the ugly ads that have worked for us.

When most marketers hear about “ugly” ads, they clutch their pearls and assume “oh, those are only for sales, but at the expense of brand”.

I get it. I’ve worked on massive mega brands. The thought of doing something less than 100% polished doesn’t make sense for many marketers. That bias goes back centuries and is due to 2 things:

I’m not saying you should make the ugliest ad possible. I’m saying you should study the content your audience consumes and try to emulate that. Your audience will be more likely to pay attention if your ad doesn’t immediately look and feel like and ad.

Here’s one of my earlier pieces about why my best ugly ads are often hated by marketers.

You’ll be able to use these ugly ad templates immediately and get them live in your account in minutes. They also now have a monthly membership to get access to all of their existing templates and 10 new ones that get added every week. I make a few buckaroos if you buy through my link here:

It’s hard to break out of those habits and correct for these biases, but chances are if you’re reading this, you already are aware of this and you’re trying. Give yourself a pat on the back!

It used to require massive levels of spend and had to be handled by Facebook reps and using third party partners.

Over the years the minimum spends have decreased and Facebook built a self-serve brand lift tool that has actually been available to me for 3-4 years now in the Experiments tab (this page should work if you’re logged in to FB and have access to it).

You can find more info from Meta about their brand lift studies here and learn more from this Facebook Blueprint training, but some of it might be out of date, because that’s just how things work at Meta 😅

I used these lift tests for Lone River Ranch Water when we were spending on Facebook optimizing for high intent website actions, but not sales because we weren’t selling Ranch Water directly. Our product was only sold in stores and we optimized our ads based on which ads were best at driving people to the store locator. This brand lift measurement helped us understand if our ads were driving significant impact overall (which they were!) and helped us quickly grow the brand and get acquired by Diageo just 1 year after launch.

This brand lift data is super valuable to any brand or product being sold beyond DTC because many users are simply never going to buy from your website, but might buy your product from Amazon where they don’t have to enter their credit card info or get your annoying emails, or the next time they’re at Target and see it and just toss it in their cart.

If you’ve been only DTC for a long time and suddenly moved to retail, the better your ads have done in terms of brand lift, the better your product will sell in retail.

Running these studies has helped me develop my broader perspective about the impact ads have on audiences. Whatever immediate sales your campaigns drive, your brand impact can be 3-10 times larger (if you don’t neglect your brand in your ads) and that can be realized the more your brand is more available to customers.

In case you missed it or were curious what I currently do, I do a lot… I advise (and own a part of) one of the highest performance creative agencies on the planet, Adcrate.co (email me if you’d like help with your performance creative!), I do media buying for a couple clients, consulting and audits for growing/large brands, I make banger ads for brands, and I spend lots of time tweeting.

Aside from all of that, one of my main roles is running the ads and performance creative as Head of Growth at Rotten, where we sell sickeningly delicious gummy worms with 60% less sugar than the leading gummy worm brand, without making you look like a nerd eating low sugar crap.

Ok, now that that’s all out of the way, let’s dig in!

Rotten isn’t just available through EatRotten.com, but also on Amazon, and in retail stores, so we want to see additional lift from our ads aside from immediate sales.

We're running plenty of “ugly” performance ads and our campaigns are optimized for conversions, which are not normally what you’d think of in terms of “brand awareness”, but alas…

Here's the overall summary of the results compared to norms in terms of percent lift you may have already seen on Twitter or LinkedIn. Our ads are multiple times more impactful than the category and North American norms:

Reading and interpreting these results can be kinda daunting if you haven’t seen them before. Basically, that “41.3 pts” is referring to the improvement from the control (unexposed holdout) group % to the test (exposed) group %, in this case going from 11.9% to 53.1% as you’ll see further down below.

Here's the summary of results in terms of cost per lift:

Keep in mind that we are not optimizing for these brand results, so the fact that these costs are below norms is a huge win, most campaigns that achieve this kind of lift are optimizing for things like reach. This is all bonus brand awareness beyond the immediate sales we’re driving.

Ad recall results: 11.8% of people not exposed to our ads during this period answered that they recalled seeing our ads, while 53.1% of people exposed to our ads answered that they recalled seeing our ads. That's a 41.3 point lift.

Think about that. MOST people who saw our ads in the prior 2 days recalled seeing our ads. In a world where users see thousands of ads per day, having our ads stand out that much and be recalled is huge.

What metrics do you normally think about when you think of your ad performance CPA? CPM? CPC? CTR? Hook rate? None of those translate directly to people recalling your ads. All of them can be misleading if your brand isn’t somehow baked into your ad. (but on the other hand, few people will pay attention or care about your ad if you blast them with your brand immediately and in an irrelevant way that doesn’t get past their subconscious ad blockers.)

Favorability results: we saw an 11.3 point shift in favorability, with 21.7% of our reached audience saying they find Rotten to be Favorable versus 10.4% of the control group who didn't see our ads during this period:

This is a great sign for Rotten because it shows our ads are working at moving people from unfavorable or neutral to more favorable perspectives. We still have a lot of work to do to move people from the very unfavorable side of things (I imagine Liquid Death had a similar challenge in their early days).

Looking at action intent, this is where there should be the most overlap with actual ales. If someone saw the ad, clicked it, and bought it, you could expect them to probably answer “very likely” (I wish there was a way to add “already purchased” or connect sales lift data into this framework too).

To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed that the “very likely” increase was tiny. That leads me to want to work even harder on our ads, landing pages, site, and offer to get people to be even more likely, but I also can’t really complain when our ads moved a whopping 78.3k users to be more likely to buy our product than they were before.

Those are people who are more likely to buy our product online and offline in the future. I know those users will be seeing more of our ads in the coming weeks and months, and expect we’ll be able to convert more directly, as well as get others to buy in retail (although we can’t track that and that’s ok!).

Overall, really fantastic results I’m proud of. When we’re a new brand (not even 6 months old) and the control/unexposed users are relatively low already, it can be easier to see some of these relatively huge results than with bigger and more established brands, but it’s still a great sign that our ads are driving larger long-term impact than simply immediate sales.

Note: Meta uses a small scale 10% holdout control group to measure this lift which can have a small impact on your delivery. I haven’t noticed it significantly and find the sacrifice to be worthwhile.

Also, Meta flagged that these results should be considered reliable, but I would not recommend trusting your brand lift test results if they’re lower probability or if they were recently launched and you’d see something like this and some caution ⚠️ icons alongside your results:

Easy! If it's available for your account (I've found it in most of my accounts), go to your Experiments page from Ads Manager and smash your mouse button on the “Create New Test” button in the top right corner.

You should then see several options for tests and ongoing monthly or quarterly Brand Lift Monitoring:

The test I used here was the “Brand Lift” test in the middle, but I’m now using the Brand Lift monitoring function highlighted here, which seemingly does these Brand Lift tests automatically every month, so now you can better track your brand lift over time.

I prefer favorability over standard brand awareness, but the choice is yours.

This new feature is a great way to set it and forget it so you can always have brand lift running in the background and never need to keep manually recreating new ones.

While you won't get super granular info about what ads are working best, being able to track changes in brand lift over time is extremely valuable and can help you evaluate and validate whether the ads you're running and changes you're making are benefiting or hurting your brand over time.

Note: I’m in the US and not aware of international availability or if these tools are rolled out wide, but I’ve had access to regular brand lift tests like this for years.

As with most FB ad topics I talk about, it’s at the crossroads of creative and media buying.

You don’t need to run reach or brand awareness campaigns to build your brand. If you do run those campaigns, you don’t need to run separate “brand assets”. That’s a common mistake I see. You can run a campaign optimized for brand awareness, but you don’t need to use specific assets for it. In fact, from my experience, those “brand assets” are so ineffective at getting attention from new audiences that they generate less incremental brand lift than many performance creatives.

If you’re thinking about expanding your reach or getting more brand awareness, consider moving up the funnel first. Maybe optimize for add to carts instead of reach. Don’t trust that the system knows when you’re optimizing for reach that you actually want to drive sales eventually.

If you optimize for reach, you’re telling the system to optimize to the lowest cost users on the lowest cost placements using the lowest cost to deliver ads. That is not how you drive significant impact.

Be smart about this. If you don’t have experience with this area and need some help, book a call with me and I can help you through it!

Your brand lift doesn’t end at your ad, your landing pages and website have a large impact on brand lift. While Ad Recall is mostly just about people recalling seeing ads from your brand, so the landing page isn’t that useful, the favorability and intent lift can both be impacted more by your landing page/website experience.

Here’s the main landing page we’ve been using for Rotten. It’s not perfect, but I think it does a decent job of showcasing the brand (maybe even too much!) while driving people to buy immediately. I like to think many visitors who weren’t ready to buy immediately had a positive brand impact and the results we see here support that.

I’m open to any feedback/improvements you might have for me, please smash the reply button and let me know!

Check out the actual questions that are being asked of users and note how the “brand” in the questions is the page name. You can’t edit that as part of the study.

Our page name is “Rotten Gummy Worms” but I’d wager that we’d see different results if the page name was just “Rotten”. It could go better or worse either way.

Think about it: if the page name is just “Rotten”, it’s possible that more or less of the unexposed control audience might answer differently based on their interpretation of that, whereas “Rotten Gummy Worms” is more specific and couldn’t be for something else Rotten.

Keep this in mind if you have a generic brand name or common word as your page name, you might see weird or misleading results, or maybe consider changing your page name to something more explicit.

Sure, here are 4 of our top spending (thusly highest impact) ads, they’re all rather ugly and authentic, and also all feature the brand prominently (see, you can do both!).

Keep in mind, I wouldn’t say we’re dialed in yet from an ad creative standpoint and need to try a lot more different angles and styles. Each of these ads is a little bit different and relevant to different users. Have you seen any of these in the wild? What do you think of them? Reply and let me know!

I’m able to easily save and share all of these ads here, thanks to Foreplay. Foreplay is one of the few tools I use every day and love using. I can quickly and easily bookmark ads and save them for later.

I also use Foreplay’s Discovery tool to search through ads already bookmarked by other advertisers. It’s an incredible extension of the existing ad library and should totally pay for itself for anyone reading this.

Use this link to sign up for Foreplay and I’ll make a few bucks! Thanks for supporting me and this newsletter.

Btw, I happen to also be a “Foreplay Expert”. When I told my wife that, she said “HA, according to who?!” 🫠 Anyway, my expert page has some other examples of ads I’ve bookmarked that you should definitely check out.

If you’ve made it this far, please respond to this email and say “deep end” (and anything else you want to say) and I’ll pick someone to get a free Make Ugly Ads hatt, a box of Rotten Gummy Worms, AND 30 minute consulting call with me! You’ll get all three, a total value of over $600! Yes, even if you simply skipped all the way down here, you filthy disgusting cheater. If you already replied to this email earlier, no need to reply again, that counts!

The winner of last issues’ deep end reply was Rob C!

In case you missed that last newsletter, we covered cost caps vs lowest cost media buying on Meta. I got a lot of replies to that one and it was one of my favorite things I’ve gotten to wrap my head around in a while, I’m looking forward to doing more pieces like that in the future.

Oh, and here’s a coupon code for $100 off my ad account audit template, knocking the price down to just $97: use code HAVEACLUES100.

Finally…

If you haven’t already gotten my friend Dara’s incredible Performance Creative Master Course, you can get it here and use code UGLYADS (duh) for $100 off! After you order through my link, please reply “DARA” to this email to let me know and I’ll send you a free Make Ugly Ads hatt of your choice.

That’s all for now! Thanks again for subscribing. Have a high-performing week!

Hott regards,
Barry Hott