Barrier of Entry vs Barrier of Experience

Anyone can run Meta ads by setting up campaigns on auto-pilot"

I'm hearing this sentiment more and more. Partially because Meta's newest ad products simplify campaign setup with a lot of default settings configured for you.

But there's a big difference between lowering the barrier to entry and lowering the barrier to excellence.

The biggest obstacle is that there are many plays in the Meta ad playbook that work great for some brands and are disastrous for others. Here’s just a few examples:

💡 CONSOLIDATION

☑ Small brands - Works great when you have a small account with low volume. Lump all the data into one campaign to ensure you hit the minimum of 50 conversions per week.

✖ Big brands - Consolidation offers zero value to a larger account who does 1000s of conversions per week.

💡 MANUAL BIDDING

☑ Established businesses - this works great for brands that know their ideal bid and have found the sweet spot of controlling costs and getting the scale they want.

✖ New advertisers - Getting your bid & budget settings wrong can be a costly mistake. Bidding too high can lead to catastrophic over-spend and bidding too low can lead to no spend at all.

💡 BROAD TARGETING

☑ Broadly appealing products - If your product is appealing to everyone and anyone and you have a healthy volume of past converters to train a learning model, this is a very efficient and effective way to scale up your ads.

✖ Niche/low-volume products - If you have a niche product, it could be an expensive mistake to use broad audiences. Without enough specificity or signal volume, this audiences can struggle to find the right prospects.

💡 USER-GENERATED CREATIVE

☑ Low-trust consumer products - If its hard to trust that your product works, having real customers demonstrate your product working well is a great way to be authentic, leverage social proof, and leverage user-generated content.

✖ Premium products - If you have premium products at a higher price point, you’ll often do better with a professional and premium look and feel that is more true to your brand. UGC could backfire if it makes your brand look ordinary or lower quality.

The key point: professional ad buyers with decades of experience not only know the ins and outs of the ad platforms, but they know how to tailor their services. Beginners who learn to buy from a Youtube video are going to run the same playbook on every account (because it’s all they know). Don’t underestimate the value of experience.