I'd much rather compete against a brand with an artificially inflated $100 AOV than the brand who figured out a business model to support a $25 AOV
Low AOV makes everything work better:
- conversion rate
- estimated action rate
- FB bids
- ad creatives
- customer retention
- reviews/product expectations
- upselling/cross-selling
Low AOV maxxing
.@stevenborrelli on the pricing experiment that flipped their unit economics:
"Our AOV dipped to $140. But then our CAC dipped from like $120 to $55."
"To get the same revenue, we did have to acquire more customers. But the new customer count—in August of this year, we acquired half of the total '25 cohort in one month."
"It's almost like a weird thing where the customer getting more value is what lowered the CAC."
Meta performance is complete garbage this week out of no where
Don't know what is wrong or what happened but it's very noticeable, CVR is the only metric down a lot
Thought we bottomed on performance the other week, we did not
Something is seriously off with Meta traffic right now.
We're seeing conversion rates drop by as much as 30–40% across parts of our portfolio over the last 3 weeks.
And it's not just e-commerce.
DTC, B2B, lead gen. Different industries. Same pattern.
Here's the weird part:
CPMs? Fine.
CTRs? Fine.
Add to carts? Fine.
Initiated checkouts? Fine.
Actual conversions? Falling off a cliff.
The brands struggling the most have one thing in common:
They're NOT running aggressive promotions.
Meanwhile, brands that have been pushing offers through Labor Day, Prime Day, and now Halloween?
They're doing just fine.
We've seen similar behavior around major shopping events before, but I don't remember seeing it at this scale or for this long.
And after speaking with other Tier 1 advertisers, I'm hearing very similar stories.
Which makes me think something bigger is happening.
Two possibilities:
1. Meta is making significant backend changes, as they frequently do, with very little communication about how those changes affect delivery and traffic quality.
2. We're seeing broader macroeconomic or consumer behavior shifts that are starting to affect even Meta's ability to find high-intent buyers.
And that second possibility is particularly interesting.
Meta has historically been exceptionally good at finding people who are ready to buy, even when the broader market isn't doing particularly well.
But right now, something isn't adding up.
I don't know which explanation is right. Could be a combination of both.
What I do know is that this isn't isolated to a few underperforming accounts anymore.
What are you guys seeing?
"Facebook ads are way too expensive nowadays, I must diversify now!"
This couldn't be further from the truth and is pure cope slop
If you have a great product that a lot of customers truly want and you price it fairly (i.e. the same price it'd sell for on a shelf in nationwide retail), there is infinite scale for you
The formula is simple but not easy:
- Great product with big TAM
- Excellent, engaging marketing
- Fair prices
I believe the fair prices is the most overlooked part, your customers are much smarter than you might think and intuitively know how much margin you are making off of them
"I have GREAT margins thought" - you will just pay it back to Meta in CAC and complain that Meta doesn't work
You can have a great product and excellent marketing, but if your prices are ridiculous, customers will know and at scale it simply won't work
People want to buy great products without getting ripped or scammed on price, the brands doing this are scaling like there is no tomorrow
How do you think $99.99 AG1 is doing against $29.99 Gruns? Not good I'd bet!
Estimated action rate is just as important of a factor in your bid as your "allowable CAC" that you try to juice with artificially high AOVs
Lower AOV = lower CAC = more volume = more signal to Meta = lower CAC ...
Sub $20 CACs and the low AOV game is more alive than it has ever been ... do not believe anyone telling you otherwise
I agree with Sean, the ecom game has never been more simple and high leverage
You can spend $100k/day on ads with a team of 2-3 people now. You can make $1m+ year with the same
It's a simple business, have a great product that a lot of people want and be a master at selling it, that's it, it's always a deep of love of the basics that let you win
If you can do that, then the leverage you gain with these ad platforms is just insane, it really is a once in a lifetime opportunity right now
And AI is only amplifying and accelerating it, not only is almost every cost on our PnL under pressure now, but you can grow faster with less, what more could you want?
This is how you can drastically lower CPM and CAC over time
Give Facebook's users a more relevant experience through relevant content (ads, landing pages, offers) and they will take your desired action more
It is simple and obvious but so few take it to heart
Think about what you can do to improve the quality of experience of the users Facebook sends you and you will in turn get rewarded by Facebook with cheaper conversions and more volume
Funnel congruency -> So make sure the ad speaks to the same audience as the landing page.
Example:
Ad: Do your feet hurt after a long day of walking? -> Landing page: 8 Reasons Why This is The #1 Shoe To Loose Weight ❌
Ad: Do your feet hurt after a long day of walking? -> Landing page: 8 Reasons Why People With Aching Feet Are Switching to These Shoes ✅
Having a small circle of ecom killers who have successful and growing businesses, and spend a lot of their own money on ads, will always beat listening to the mass crowd in here
I’ve got maybe 8-10 folks I truly listen to between creative, ad account and biz ops stuff
The rest is just noise that will distract you to death. And the best advice is not shared publicly on podcasts or in newsletters
And I'm sitting here on my computer making AI video song ads about a step mom sending nudes to an uncle on christmas morning to sell boomers oregano oil pills on a monthly subscription
Can you guys please give me the option to disable Shopify Sidekick on our account? @Shopify @tobi
I don't want it and I especially don't want it jammed in my face on every single Shopify screen
I use 1 chatbot and 1 chatbot only, I will never use a different chatbot on every single software tool in our business
ChatGPT and Claude won, bend the knee, and just build better software, please
I am positive adding a "disable" button would make ~85-90% of merchants happier
Single CBO per product/region is banging
In the last 30 days we have 3 new top 10 ads in our account. All were simply entered into the CBO, won spend and scaled into the top 10
I believe that ads not spending in CBO is largely just cope
Make better ads, follow the trends of what is winning spend when you add it to the CBO, keep iterating and improving on it, enter super unique content types into the CBO, figure out what key message is missing, etc...
You can mess with mins/maxs if you want but it's not gonna turn a bad ad into a good ad, nor is ABO testing. Good ads win spend, plain and simple
There's no such thing as a banger prospecting ad sitting in a CBO with $1 in spend that turns into a scaled winner in an ABO
It makes sense to have 1 core funnel (i.e. campaign) per product and your job is to continue scaling it up and adding in the missing/new pieces (ads) to it to continue improving it
Come at me all you want, but we've never spent so much, grown so much and had such a good CPA since the single CBO took hold. I've also never spent less time in the ad account too, which all just goes towards making better ads.
These hooks are just crazy man, how in the world is this an ad selling mushroom coffee
Heres how to automate viral song ads like this for your brand
What makes a transformation more desirable to your customer?
its how the people around them react
the way theyre treated
so i built this framework that takes:
>your product
>your customer
>the problem affecting their relationships and people around them
>how they actually want to be treated and how they want those people to see them
and it creates concepts around that:
> Creates a viral hook using a physical action to show a relatable experience personalized to your customer and pushed to an extreme relationship failure connected to their problem
> taps into the pain, insecurity and desire to make someone who dismissed them regret it
>uses your product as the tool to become the person that proves everyone wrong
>builds a "look at me now" payoff around them getting their life back
>shows how theyre perceived differently as their confidence, appearance,finances, status... improves
the framework then turns that story into:
> full concept + lyrical script
>musical style + direction
> unique characters + environments
>visual beats and shot sequences that optimize the emotional punches of each line
>and generates the scenes
these song ads work when u remember the psychology behind what makes a good song and how those emotional triggers could get someone to act on buying your product
people are motivated by spite, the desire to prove someone wrong and make them regret underestimating you
the "look at me now" payoff makes the reaction they've been daydreaming about visible so they recognize exactly what they want
your product needs to become the "weapon" they need to take revenge
and this is just one of the angles that my framework can come up with
let me know if you wanna try it
I'd love to know how Shopify development agencies are still in business
We've shipped more site updates, landing pages, design improvements and code optimizations in the last 3 months (with improved performance) with Claude Code than we did in our prior 5 years with a full on Shopify dev agency
Now you design something, QA it and ship it in 15-20 minutes, it used to take 5-7 business days
All you need is a banging designer
It is probably the #1 thing we've fully replaced with claude- replaced the labor and cost itself and massively improved our launch/testing abilities that let us grow faster
We can now invest more in design when needed too, or when it's a bigger project than we like doing with claude design
- Breakthrough prospecting ad creatives, 1-2 ads can truly change your ad account. For us it's whitelisted native yapper ads
- Lowering price/AOV on acquisition offer. Making product prices fair and not having price be #1 purchase objection
- Simplifying landing pages to be PDP/offer pages and testing the shit out of CRO elements on there. Then getting a winner and duping with new headlines to match ads
- Consolidating and simplifying ad account, all marginal time is spent on ads not screwing around in ad account settings
- Reframing offer to reach different groups without actually changing offer (calling it a welcome kit, using % instead of $ off, product titles with benefits that match ads, ect)
- High volume of statics to cover every single lower funnel purchase objection, problem solution, FAQ, concern etc a customer might have before buying
These tactics only work if you run a single mega consolidated CBO in Meta on 7DC1DV1DE with 5,000+ ads live in a maximum of 10 ad sets on a subscription-only offer
Can someone who is running 8,000+ ads on Meta please explain how their ad account is built?
How many campaigns do you have?
How many ad sets per campaign?
How many ads per ad set?
How do you consolidate things?
How do you know if things are overlapping or not?
How are you analyzing why creatives worked or failed?
How are you testing landing pages and different offers?
Etc...
"My top creator made 660 ads for me in the last 30 days."
@LukasPakter (Founder of Haus, @TrybeUGC) uploads 8,000 new unique ads to Meta every month.
So many that Meta just capped him.
Most brands get 10-30 videos a month from a creator. Lukas wants 100+ and for his brand to be their full-time job.
A creator juggling 10 brands can't go that deep.
"This guy wakes up, and he thinks about tank tops and five-inch shorts."
That creator's goal: make 7 figures in the next 2 years.
Meta performance is still pretty bad since mid September.
Specifically the 13-14th is when is it immediately fell off a cliff.
Seems like some update was pushed and still hasn’t recovered 3 weeks later.
1 battle tested PDP/offer page = 20+ different LPs if you duplicate it and match the headline to the ad/offer
It is very easy to build ad -> LP congruency this way
If your AOV is below ~$100, a very solid PDP is all you need to sell your product. If you can't get it working, it's very likely that your ads aren't good enough












