Barry Hotto, a longtime Facebook advertising consultant, said the first response to an ad plays a big role in how it performs, and he advises advertisers to create great-looking ads that people won’t want to skip over.
“I’m the ugly ad guy,” he told me.
In a recent conversation, Hott talked about key Facebook ad metrics, budgets, testing, and of course, ugly creative. The full audio of the conversation is embedded below. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Eric Brandholtz: Who are you?
Barry Hott: I’m the co-owner of a performance marketing agency called Adcrate, where we work on high-performance ad creative, and I also do a lot of consulting through my company, Hott Growth. I’m a long-time Facebook ad nerd. You may know me as the guy who “makes ugly ads.”
Brandholtz: What changes the performance of your ads?
hot: We don’t care about cost-per-impression or click-through rate benchmarks. We care about targeting. Does your system allow you to target existing customers or recent visitors? Depending on the answer, we’ll look at the data differently.
From a systemic media buying perspective, it’s about empathy with your AI or machine learning algorithm, understanding how and why it works the way it does, how and why it is incentivized, and how and why it can be corrupted. The system wants you to spend more money and get more credit for more sales.
You can also use third-party attribution tools, and most will need to use them over an extended period of time to understand how performance is tracked outside of the platform.
Brandholtz: What do you think about Facebook’s bid caps?
hot: I think there are problems with all bid caps and hard cost caps. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use them. They are: Used in a particular way.
For example, let’s say you’re not paying very much per ad buy, but your system knows it’s driving overall sales, and you’re concerned that if you set your bid too low or your cost cap too low, individual ads placed in ad sets with bids that are too low will not have the opportunity to spend enough to support your entire ad ecosystem.
I was controlled testing environment For each new concept, an ad set is created for organization and just to keep things competitive.
Brandholtz: What metrics do you want to achieve?
hot: First of all, the same environment (targeting, Attributionsettings. Everything stays the same. I need to know if the best ads will cost this much and deliver this much per purchase. Anything within that range is useful. Anything above that in terms of cost is just not useful to me. Anything below that is fatal.
Typically I have a test environment that excludes existing customers and some visitors. It can be anything from 1-day visitors to 30-day visitors. It depends on the account and the business. I like to test ads for cold audiences. As an advertiser and media buyer, I aim to create ads that make sense and work for my customers. The widest and coldest audienceMany people will say that’s stupid, but if it works for them, it will work for my dedicated audience.
Brandholtz: How much money will it take before you give up?
hot: The key is to get enough useful data. And it depends on what you’re selling. Are you selling $100 items or $1,000 items? What your tolerance is, depending on your budget and your return on ad spend. It all varies. I usually look for about 20 good signals at the ad set level, and hopefully 20 that result in actual purchases. At that point, I’ll know.
I’ll look at an ad that was quickly stopped by a bid due to lack of spend and make a hypothesis about it: Why did the ad fail? Can I adjust it? I’d rather spend time getting more data to see if there are other pockets or placements elsewhere. I’ll lose money, and that’s OK. But I’ll use that time to analyze it and learn from it from a creative standpoint.
However, if you don’t have the time to do such an analysis, use strict bidding and cost caps.
Brandholtz: What kind of creativity produces good results?
hot: Again, I’m a person who makes ugly ads. Our brains as marketers tell people to focus on making things uglier because it makes them more beautiful. What matters is relatability, relevance, authenticity. You can do it in a way that’s not ugly. I don’t recommend it. But you can.
First reactions are often more important than anything else. Make something that people care about, something they can immediately relate to. Make something that people can’t miss. What will make people uncomfortable?
Brandholtz: Where can we follow you?
hot: Go to Adkraat or Hot Growth. I am in X (Bingot) and LinkedIn.
