Since I started running Facebook Ads in 2015, on an almost hourly basis from the start to end of day, I’d fire open Ads Manager to see how things were doing.

That means opening an interface, waiting for something to load, clicking around, maybe taking some screenshots to share in another channel or message, and then repeating with other clients.

Today, media buying is not an hourly task. But I find senior growth strategists still have that reaction built into them.

But, getting that data is pretty broken. Ads Manager is not by any stretch a perfect product, and in fact it’s something of an in-joke with most ads managers out there.

With the rise of AI, various unofficial MCPs made lots of promises this year. Then came the fear of the bans.

Lots pushed back and pointed out if you were going to break Meta TOS with rate limits, that’s going to be why. But still we quietly beavered away trying to make MCPs work for us.

And then, glory behold, last week 29 April 2026, Meta launches Ads CLI.

It’s a command line tool for the Marketing API. That sounds more technical than it is. In practice, it means you can ask Meta for spend, impressions, CPA, video metrics, campaign status and breakdowns from the terminal.

No Python scripts.

No Postman.

No clicking through Ads Manager just to answer one question.

We’ve been playing with this kind of setup for a while. Being in the Terminal is fun, for anyone who grew up on the Matrix or watching the Social Network, operating in the command line feels particularly l33t. But it’s actually not that it’s cooler, but it’s a far better environment for repeating questions.

Across an agency, those questions come up constantly:

• What did this account spend yesterday?

• What was CPA yesterday and did it deviate from the norm?

• Is any account overspending today?

• How is CPA progressing this week?

• Are there any rocketship winners in the new test?

• If the CPA is high, are breakdowns shifting at all?

• And so on

You can answer those inside Ads Manager. Of course you can. But it takes just enough time that it becomes a frustrating piece of manual work.

Not only that but setting up command line software has always been painful.

If you were like me, you spent a long time as a kid tinkering around with commands that looked like this:

tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz

Only for something to inevitably break as whatever it was you just tried to install didn’t open correctly. You then spend hours on StackOverflow trying to find the answer. At which point, you either felt like Boris in Goldeneye, or that code life wasn’t for you.

Claude changes that.

While AI hallucinates a lot, in code it hallucinates less.

And in management of command line interface tools, my experience is it operates even better.

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What you need before starting

You need:

• A Mac (Linux or Windows likely will work similarly, but this is untested there)

• Claude Code installed in the command line

• A Meta Business Manager with access to the ad accounts you want to query.

Step 1: get Claude Code to install Meta Ads CLI for you

Open up your terminal and let’s create a directory for Meta Ads to be installed from.

Prompt something like this:

josh@Joshs-MacBook-Pro-4 ~ % mkdir cc
josh@Joshs-MacBook-Pro-4 ~ % cd cc
josh@Joshs-MacBook-Pro-4 cc % mkdir meta-ads
josh@Joshs-MacBook-Pro-4 cc % cd meta-ads
josh@Joshs-MacBook-Pro-4 meta-ads % claude

‘mkdir’ means make directory, it creates a ‘cc’ (claudecode) folder, ‘cd’ means change directory, it changes to that directory. And then claude initiates Claude Code in that directory.

Claude will open and then prompt it something like this:

Please can you fully install for me - so that it works across my entire computer in all folders the following:  
https://pypi.org/project/meta-ads/   

Depending on what existing packages you have installed, Claude will guide you through the setup.

What you’ll likely see is a mixture if: checking and install python (and various versions), uv, homebrew and more.

As a sidebar, pre-Claude code, this was always one of those frustrating steps. So many apps had issues with python versions that meant lots of back and forth with StackOverflow, copying and pasting until something just worked. Claude solve all of that.

Eventually you’ll get something that looks like this:

At which point, you can herald happy days that you’re all set up.

To confirm, open a new Terminal (CMD+N), confirm you’re in the same directory as you were before (this time just using cd not mkdir to get there) and enter:

meta

And you should get an output that looks like this:

It’s not time to configure.

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Step 2: setting up the Meta admin side

Now you need to connect Meta to this setup. There’s a few things you need, first is an ‘app’ which while that sounds like you’re about to build an iPhone app, it really just reflects that you’re building an application to connect to Meta.

Create an App with Meta

1. Head to here https://developers.facebook.com/apps/ and click ‘Create App’

2. Give the app a name

   

3. Choose “Create & manage ads with Marketing API”

   

4. Next up choose your business or agency account, ‘Requirements’ should be empty, then click through to Overview and click Create. Authenticate if asked. Congratulations, you’ve just registered an app with Meta.

Set basic settings for your app

1. In the new app directory, click App settings and then Basic.

2. You’ll need to upload an app icon, a terms of service URL and choose a category.

3. Go through the remainder of the settings in here, and eventually click ‘Publish’

4. Keep this tab open and open a new tab.

Create a System User

1. Head over to here https://business.facebook.com/latest/settings/system_users

2. Click “Add” and create a system user.

3. Call it something like “Automation” or “Claude” and then give it the admin role.

Assign your account(s) and connect the app

1. Click the … and then “Assign Assets”

2. Choose your Instagram profile, Facebook page, and Ad Account here. If you manage multiple clients, this is where you add those too.

3. Check the accounts are all connected.

4. Under the app system user name you’ll see an “ID” click it to copy it

Assign your app to your user

1. Switch back to the app tab, click “Roles” under “App roles”

2. Click “Add People”, choose “Administrator”

3. Paste the user id you just copied, and complete the add.

4. Switch back to Business Manager, refresh and check the app is connected.

Generate an access token

Back in in “System Users” in Business Manager, you want to click “Generate Token”

1. Choose your new app

2. Keep ‘60 days’ selected for token expiry

3. Under “permissions” ensure the following are enabled:

   1. business_management

   2. ads_management

   3. pages_show_list

   4. pages_read_engagement

   5. pages_manage_ads

   6. catalog_management

   7. read_insights

4. Click “Generate Token”

At this point, you may need to wait for a fellow admin to authorise this request.

Once done, you’ll be granted a token which you need to make a note of.

Setting up your Meta Ads CLI locally

Now you need to join these things together back in your Terminal.

At this point, it’s where using an IDE like VS Code or Cursor is useful, because file editing is much simpler and native to the environment you’re working in.

Note at this stage:

Instead, we’re going to use a native simple text editor.

So in your same directory you’ve made in the terminal, open a new tab or window and then type:

Enter nano .env

This opens a plain text editor called nano and creates a file called .env which is an environment file.

Inside this doc enter the following:

ACCESS_TOKEN={INSERT_THE_ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE}
AD_ACCOUNT_ID={ENTER_ACCOUNT_ID}

Switch back to Business Manager to get your ad account id if you don’t have it to hand

To save and exit in nano, you need to:

CTRL+O to bring up save
Hit ENTER to save .env as the file name
CTRL+X to exit

To check those files are displayed in the Terminal (and at this stage, double check you are not in Claude Code but the Terminal etc, enter:

cat .env

Hit enter and this will show you those file contents.

Finally test the auth status:

meta ads adaccount list

At this stage it should show you available accounts you can access along with the following subheaders.

Using Claude Code to control Meta Ads CLI

At this stage, if you like, you can start experimenting in the command line. Read through the entire official documentation.

Some example commands you could use:

meta ads insights get --fields spend,impressions,ctr
meta ads creative create
meta ads adset list

The documentation is something that you do need to read. Claude Code is a great assistant here, but remember that you’ve now granted full control to your account to a third party tool. Consider how much any AI hallucinates and now consider how you use it.

And so as a starting point, I’d recommend fully reading that documentation so you know how each comamnd works.

Once you’re comfortable that you understand the commands, it’s time to open up Claude again.

At this point, I’d prompt Claude like this:

I want you to create for me a master reference doc for some simple commands to use the meta-ads cli tool.                                                    
                                                                                                                                                               
  Please begin by reading the full documentation here: https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/ads-commerce/ads-ai-connectors/ads-cli/command-reference  
  You may need to use firecrawl API to access it.                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                               
  The core tasks I will need solving are:                                                                                                                      
  1. How is spend looking today / yesterday / this week?                                                                                                       
  2. How does spend compare to X                                                                                                                               
  3. How is CPA doing today (cost / conversions) and how does this compare?                                                                                    
  4. Rank all of our ads from the last {time period} by spend                                                                                                  
                                                                                                                                                               
  Can you please create a master cheatsheet based on this for me and save it as a meta-cheat-sheet.md file       

Claude will go away and put together this cheat sheet.

Now I like to give my Claude a few further parameters for controlling the Ads CLI. And so I added the following to my cheat sheet:

Use as few API calls as you can each time, there is a strict rate limit for the Meta Marketing API.
Only use the Meta Ads CLI to connect to Meta. DO NOT use the Meta MARKETING API directly.

Meta has 200 rate calls within one hour. That means that every time you call the Meta API with any command, it counts towards your rate limit number. Hitting that number causes the service to pause. And if you abuse it, you can have your app banned. This is essential to consider.

The second is to give Claude some guidance. Because it has an access token, it could in theory connect directly to the API. However, this is bad. The API is more complex and Claude will test and learn its way to an answer, meaning you very quickly hit those rate limits and risk a ban.

As the old adage goes, the secret to getting better answers, is to ask better questions.

When you’re dealing with rate limits (and context windows too), writing better questions is essential.

How to use this

Even a cursory glance at the Meta Ads docs will make you realise that you can create ads with this. And then anyone who is building Claude Skills will know that means you can automate it.

Not only that but there’s now an easy believable route from:

• Create ad in Nano Banana

• Automatically upload the ad to the account

• Go live

• Measure success

• Turn off ad

All within the terminal/Claude Code.

Just because you can do this, doesn’t mean you should. Creating the ads is easy, choosing what ads you want to make is hard.

Similarly just because you can access the full ads manager from your terminal, doesn’t mean you necessarily should. Rate limits are there for a reason, and just because in theory can you fully check everything, for deep explorations it’s likely not the best environemnt to do it in.

As a closing note I’m reminded of this post from just before I launched Ballpoint. At the time the FB Marketing API was a complex web to be untangled.

Today with Ads CLI + Claude Code, that all just got a little bit easier.

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I’m building Ballpoint, the AI-native growth marketing agency I always wanted to hire when I was a DTC founder and before that a head of growth. We’ve scaled brands from £1m to £50m through digital advertising. If you’re looking for support, you can email me.

In mid 2025, Haus released its meta-study of Meta ads1. The finding that stuck with me:

ASC performed 9% better than Manual campaigns at experiment midpoint. But 12% worse by the end.

In other words: ASC was quick to pick up low-hanging fruit, but had lower incrementality over time.

This matched what we were seeing. And it raised an obvious question: should…

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Three weeks ago, we launched our Annual Report, which you can download now. We are publishing key stories from this in the run up to Christmas.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know I’ve been banging this drum since 2023.

Clickthrough rates don’t correlate with CPA.

I wrote about it in March 2023. I wrote about it again in Septemb…

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I hope you had an excellent Black Friday weekend, and now well into planning for the last stretch of the year.

A fortnight ago, we launched our second ever Annual Report.

What’s important this year?

Over the last 18 months, Meta has introduced four major algorithm updates.

1. Lattice

2. Andromeda

3. Sequence Learning

4. GEM

All four of these have changed how yo…

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Last week, we launched our Annual Report, which we’ll be launching soon to a wider audience. For the next three weeks, we’ll be publishing key stories from that report followed by our usual Annual Book Review and reflection of the best articles of the year.

2025 is the year that AI ads started to become real alternatives.

Having an annual reflection is important because it highlights just how much (and how little) can change in a year. The production of ads is one of those key pillars.

Here are the learnings from our data, reflections on the year, and highlights of conversations we had.

Notes for references throughout
The data from our Annual Report is based on £11m of ad spend. The Annual Report launch was attended by 52 people – roughly a third of whom were clients.

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20% of teams still use no AI

At the Annual Report launch, I asked people for a show of hands as to how much AI they used in ads.

The results?

• 100% AI – 2% of the audience

• Majority AI (more than 50% of ads) – 10% of audience

• Some AI (up to 50%) – 68% of audience

• No AI – 20%

I wanted to dig into this and so have had multiple conversations over the last few weeks about this. Here are the core buckets of people:

AI doesn’t get approved because it’s not good enough

In many cases, these are the sorts of brands who get push back on creative anyway. Brands where creator content is still a discussion to be had rather than a default, and there is a push for brand consistency across social assets.

In this case, there is the view that AI creative is highly distinguishable, and not good enough. When pushed on whether if it was indistinguishable from non-AI creative whether it would still be used, the teams were mixed in terms of yeses and nos.

Ethical concerns

For some brands, the core issue is the big environmental cost associated with AI – and by actively using AI ads, you become an active contributor to that. For some of these brands they might either have the environment as core brand pillars or alternatively see it as in conflict of their B corp status.

Similarly, there are ethical concerns about a future creative joblessness created by AI.

Customer complaints

One thing we see a lot of is users on platforms being negative towards AI. Either ridiculing it for its silliness, or actively calling out the brand for its use. Common complaints are often those from the creative joblessness angle, but they are broad. One ad comment we saw this year called the brand “lazy at marketing” for using it.

The emergence of an AI-Free Corp

One of my predictions for 2026 is the emergence of a certificate or signal whereby you actively decide you won’t use AI.

The current global economy is full of businesses that offer premium or luxury experiences on top of otherwise commodity products. Take coffee as a core example, you can get coffee for very very little in a lot of places. Coffee is a commodity available to everyone, but over the last 15 years, the new coffee class has emerged.

Now, everyone wants something a little more premium, while there is still a coffee elite/snob that is lionised and catered for in a smaller selection of venues.

In short there is commodity + premium + luxury.

I think the same will become true for AI.

AI will become the de facto norm for a huge number of brands in advertising, and that will reach from commodity (likely the Meta’s offering) through to creative and well executed. And then alongside that, there will be a separate class of ‘No AI’ creative brands, who use that as a point of differentiation.

2026 prediction: The emergence of a certificate or organisation that shows you are “AI Free”

Either way, as it currently stands, the ‘no AI’ crew is bigger than the ‘all in’ crew. As for the middle: the ‘some’ vs ‘most’ I imagine this time next year, the ‘most ads are made with AI’ crew will become the norm.

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AI ads make up a small amount of overall spend

There are two charts in the Annual Report that I thought were telling.

The first looks at spend across the last 12 months by production type.

For reference, we view each of these categories as “what is the majority of the ad made by.”

• AI is made using an AI tool as a starting point

• Creator is individual creator/influencer on their phone

• Studio is person sat at a Mac with After Effects/Photoshop/etc

Now this reflects a few things. First, that AI has only become good enough this year. Second, that it’s still just a small percent of overall spend for the year.

When you look at this on a “spend per ad” basis however, it changes.

Spend per ad is useful because it removes other variables like ‘number of assets made for each type’.

In this case AI is now at just 75% of the spend per ad as Creator or Studio.

That’s an incredibly close gap considering how underinvested in the category is.

We’ve had over a decade working on studio ads. And five years working on creator ads. But AI ads have only had experimentation for the last year.

It’s still super early. But once our learning, creativity, and experimentation with AI catches up, it promises something pretty impactful.

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AI ads are some of our most creative

The most exciting thing from our side is that AI ads are very often where the best creativity is happening.

Take this example for our client YourParkingSpace.

Humour and satire are great in ads. When you think that ~99% of ads don’t add any humour to them, just a little can go a long way.

This was one of those curve ball ideas in a brainstorm that felt a little out there.

The premise?

YourParkingSpace helps people book parking spaces in advance of a trip. One of the potential ‘villains’ we came up with was the Traffic Warden, and soon the idea became ‘traffic wardens must hate it because it’s fewer tickets.’

This was all a bit of fun and a bit of comedy.

It’s also the sort of thing that over a year ago, would have been left in the brainstorm room.

Why? Because, to have made this ad would have probably cost £1,000, maybe a little more.

And on paper, the most likely thing that could happen is that this won’t work. And so even if we had taken it to the client, the majority of the times, it likely would have been left in the ideas column. (Regardless of who the client is I should say, this isn’t specific to them).

That’s smart – £1,000 for something with low probability, vs the other plethora of far more likely to succeed ads that cost nothing or just a few hundred quid is a no brainer.

But with AI, this ad was achievable for a few tokens while we perfected the scripting, the brief and the prompt. And it took a few hours to get it from idea to finished ad, and was live the following day.

This is just one example where AI has completely unlocked new levels of creativity.

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Reframing how you see AI in creative

AI can save some money on making creative, sure. But that’s not its power.

It’s real power is unlocking whole new levels of creativity by helping you come up with ideas you couldn’t do before.

And for all the teams who fall into the anti-AI camp, some of those reasons are going to be non-negotiables, especially those on ethical grounds. But for those where it is a question of preservation of Brand Image, I’d recommend getting those brand teams in the room to see what you can do.

And no it’s not about feeding a product url into an ad generator and making 1,000 executions. I don’t think that’s what the future of AI will be for any large aspiring company.

It’s about starting with the idea, and then letting AI help you bring that to life.

Ultimately at the moment, it is seriously outpacing its level of investment, which means there’s opportunity and arbitrage for those who are there early.

What are your most exciting uses of AI so far?

I’d love to see some people share their most creative AI ads below. What have you come up with? What have you been able to do that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

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Josh Lachkovic is the founder of Ballpoint, a growth marketing agency that helps brands scale from £1-10M ARR. Visit Ballpoint to learn more, or subscribe to Early Stage Growth for weekly insights on profitable scaling.

Note: Ballpoint works with brands looking to grow their spend from £30k per month to £300k per month.

TL;DR: We analysed £7.5m of ad experiments to understand how quickly you can make judgements on winners/losers.

We’ve all been there. It’s day two of a new ad test and there’s zero conversions. CPA is currently ‘infinite’ and your CMO is asking “why haven’t you turned that off yet, is it ever going to recover?”

Creative testing remains the most important lever you have on Meta. In the early days it is the difference between 0 and 1. And then during scale days, the rate at which you’re able to test and learn is the deciding factor in how quickly you can grow.

But testing costs money.

There are lots of ways to test. You can test in cost controlled campaigns, in flexible ad formats, in ABO ad sets per concept. You can have a budget assigned to testing like 15% or 20%, or you can have 60%+ effectively as your testing budget.

The cost to test is high in many directions. First you’ve got the cost of putting creative together. That’s a mixture of insight + strategy + briefwriting + creative execution. The AI gurus are promising that cost is 0, but if you’ve seriously pushed volume into the AI creative, you’ll know there’s cost in other places.

Second, then there’s the cost of testing the ad in platform. Depending on your testing approach this might eat up a huge amount of budget.

While the expected value for creative testing should be high – because if your Meta engine is profitable and efficiency, feeding it with good creative is what helps it deliver results – that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of spend goes into ads that won’t ever be seen again.

We’ve just analysed the last 12 months worth of data as part of our annual report, examining 4,000 experiments.

Here are a load of insights from that report.

As with all of these things, you should be analysing this on an account by account perspective. While there are good pieces of data here to average out, these do not mean we will uniformly apply these decisions.

Use this as inspo, rather than vibes decision making.

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By day 5, you can likely predict a good or a bad ad

This is one of our biggest learnings. We run seven day tests by default. We do this for a few reasons:

• We run most ads on 7 day click, 1 day view attribution windows and so it makes sense to judge against a window you’re asking

• In-week volatility exists a lot, and that can be true ad by ad, so we like to test for a whole 7 days.

When trying to identify at what point we can predict winners or losers, we looked at a few measures:

• Receiver operating character (ROC) curve
  ”The area under the ROC curve (AUC) represents the probability that the model, if given a randomly chosen positive and negative example, will rank the positive higher than the negative.”

• Correlation coefficient between day X CPA and day 7 CPA
  This looks at the correlation between two variables.

• % of ads that are – at day X – within Y% of the day 7 CPA

1. ROC Curve

First of all on the ROC curve, if we define an ad as good/bad at day 7, which in our analysis we defined as having intervened and turned off or kept on, we can usually see whether it will be a good/bad ad at day 5.

The ROC curve is at 0.98 by day 5, meaning 98% of the time we can predict whether we would make the choice we eventually made at day 7.

💡 ACTION: Potentially intervening earlier in tests meaning either: a 28% reduction in testing budget each week, or a 28% increase in creative testing.

Our next steps are to review these curves on a client by client basis, and then also examine days of the week into the mix. We usually have set creative test launch days which means we have less data here to see how it will do across the week.

2. Correlation coefficient

The next Q is how well do they correlate together.

Correlation coefficient shows how closely two variables correlate.

• At day 3, there is a .79 correlation coefficient: a strong positive correlation

• By day 5, it’s 0.94 – a very strong positive correlation

This shows that the CPAs at day 5 correlate very strongly to the CPAs at day 7 – it doesn’t mean they are the same, but that they align and therefore you can use day 5 CPA as a proxy for day 7 CPA. (All CPAs in our study are accumulative).

3. How close are the CPAs?

This is where there is a bigger difference that isn’t immaterial.

At day 3, we’re not that close at all to the day 7 CPAs: half of the ads are within a wide 30% margin. By day 5, half are closer to 10% of final day 7 CPA.

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What about the longer term view?

The second part of our analysis dug into the longer term.

Making decisions at day 7 is one thing, but how well are we making decisions and what happens to ads afterwards?

This analysis looks at our four biggest spending accounts, and looks at ads which are still live by day 30 (i.e. those which algorithmically have continued to spend).

For each of these accounts, we have successfully managed to scale these accounts by 2-10x over the last 12 months – at agreed efficiency targets.

One brand has a faster stabilisation rate, which maybe implies we’re better at identifying winners that scale. But even so being within 20% of day 30 CPA shows that there’s actually little stabilisation that takes even with those winners.

In fact:

• While only 32% of ‘winning’ ads go on to have a CPA which decreases by day 30.

• This is mostly tightly clustered with these four accounts: 28%, 28%, 31% and 39%.

Overall the median CPA change from day 7 to day 30 is a 19% increase in CPA.

We know that Facebook Ads follows a power curve. But this is a really good example of what you need to see for creative winners to sit comfortably in your campaigns.

It’s also to be expected. Most testing campaigns act as a fractionally smaller part of budget. When ads are served to wider audiences they hit diminishing returns. And so if an ad goes from £500 of testing budget to being put into a campaign spending £5k/day – and it goes on to be a : – that will likely hit more diminishing returns.

💡 You need to allow for increases in CPA in the short term

Spend dynamics in the day 7 to day 30 view

So what actually happens in that day 7 to day 30 view. As we promote winning ads after day 7 they go into campaigns that will allow them to spend more. But, importantly, we intervene less here and the spend is algorithmic rather than human-driven.

This is the stage when good ads start to separate from great ads.

The mean spend multiplier is 22x

The median spend multiplier is 4.4x

This means that most ads scale modestly, but then there is a small number that explode.

The differences between CPA improvers and worseners

Most ads increase in CPA during this period, and for those that do, the mean goes to 29x but median is at 4.82

For the ads that decrease in CPA, the mean is a far lower 7.3x and the median is a lower still 3.7x.

Our takeaway here is that this is for the most part the breakdown effect at play, and not a signal of the auction failing, but just one that ads differ from the isolated position of testing to that of being live in Hero campaigns.

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Closing thoughts

Identifying earlier winners is something we like to think a lot about, but so too is broader understanding of how ads behave after they become winners.

This should be a good logical reminder that a good CPA in testing does not mean CPA will stay the same at scale.

Ultimately, Meta is a volume channel rather than an efficiency channel. Your goal is to find ads that have strong volume potential with affordable change in CPA.

As pointed out in the intro, this data needs analysing yourself. But for those who aren’t in a position to do so, it should help provide some colour to what happens when a test goes live.

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🔗 When you’re ready, here’s how Ballpoint can help you

→ Profitably grow paid social spend from £20k/m → £300k/m
→ Create full funnel, jobs to be done-focused creative: Meta, TikTok, YouTube
→ Improve your conversion rate with landing pages and fully managed CRO
→ Maximise LTV through strategic retention and CRM - not just sending out your emails

Email me – or visit Ballpoint to find out more.

NB: We support brands spending above £20k/month.

❤️‍🔥 Subscribe to our Substack to learn how to grow yourself

… because agencies aren’t for everyone, but our mission is to help all exciting challenger brands succeed and so we give away learnings, advice, how-tos, and reflections on the industry every week here in Early Stage Growth.

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TL;DR

Small spenders on Meta often overcomplicate their account setups. You probably only need one campaign that excludes your existing customers. Focus all your time on creative experimentation.

We audit multiple businesses each week at Ballpoint. A lot of the time, these end up being too small for us to work with and we recommend they manage it in-house…

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Meta Ads has gone through two revolutions over the last five years: one with iOS14.5 and the other with AI. Despite how well documented these are, these are the top 5 Meta lies we find startups still believe

1. Clickthrough rates can teach you how well an ad is doing

Meta has published data disproving this. Nielsen has disproven this. And in our annu…

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We’d been testing it for the year leading up to it, and the headline conclusions were positive.

Where we were running ASC it was delivering on average a 33% reduction in CPA.

We’d run these tests in a variety of ways including isolated A/B tests using Meta’s inbuilt Experiment to…

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Last week, Sean Frank, the CEO of wallet company Ridge posted some a downbeat end to 2024 for Meta Ads.

In his book, 2024 was as bad as the iOS14 year except today, there are now other opportunities around.

As an agency owner I am also highly exposed to people …

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But no-one, and I mean no-one, has ever asked how Facebook sh…

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One aspect of that is wanting to put some data behind things that often have assumptions to them. Things like thumbstop…

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What happens when all these people go away? Ever since an early boss told a room of us ‘never to bring external factors as an excuse fo…

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When I was head of growth at Thriva, I always had conversations amongst my network of ‘what’s working on Facebook?’ Or ‘how are you approaching horizontal scaling?’ ‘When was the last time you retrained your pixel?’1

When I was in-house I had a belief that there was a single truth that solved all the problems.

It was not long after starting Ballpoint that …

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We first covered this last year when I mostly referenced it in relation to media spend. Then back in April as part of my Creative Diversity post, I shared our formula for how much creative we typically work towards.

Last week, I saw an extra piece of data that adds to this whole puzzle.

Varos is a …

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On quick glance, does everything hold together in a coherent style? Does it feel and look similar? Is there consistency in how you’re approaching creatives?

If the answer is yes, then you are leaving huge amounts of growth on the table.

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Spinning tube became a bit of an ongoing in-joke. When we’d produced it, no-one expected it to do that well.. It was low budget, didn’t land much messaging, and was almost purely product-focused.

It smashed it. We tried iterating it…

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Yesterday we launched the UK Weekly Consumer Meta CPA Index to our clients. We’re going to also run this in private beta testing to a wider audience. If you’d like to join in then let me know.

First of all you probably want to know: what is it?

What is the UK Weekly Consumer Meta CPA Index?

Last weekend I read in the FT that ‘UK retail sales had fallen to …

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Occasional prospect: ‘What type of audience segmentation will you do?’
Us: ‘None.’

Meta advocates this approach today, and almost all of the time, it’s the right path to follow.

I had a conversation with friends who don’t work in marketing about what targeting on Meta was. There was an assumption that as an advertiser, we had access to all that data that …

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