We scale 7 and 8 figure DTC and digital product businesses with Conversion Revenue Optimization and Direct Response Split-Testing. Founder of 4080 Marketing.
Pittsburgh, PA
Joined January 2015
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My team and I have driven over $250 million in revenue with Facebook ads.
The #1 reason why is copywriting.
Here are our top 10 rules for writing copy that sells:
🧵 THREAD 🧵
Ethan Bence retweeted
at AdClass we've spent $31.4mil this year on meta ads for info brands.
here are the 10 lessons we've learned.
1. there are a lot of shiny objects media buyers chase that they think will improve results. almost none of them matter. what actually makes an ad account scale is simple: a great offer, good copywriting, and creative that stops the scroll. every other button-pressing ninja media buying technique is just noise in comparison with those three things.
2. most bad leads are a result of two things: bad messaging that overpromises and underdelivers, and optimizing your ads for something you don't actually want. (don't optimize for leads if what you really want is calls). if your ad says "click here to get rich", congrats, your lead quality is going to be trash. proper expectations = higher lead quality.
3. you need to set two KPIs for your ads. the first is always CAC - how much are you willing to pay for a customer? But for high ticket funnels, that's not enough. Most of you aren't doing enough volume for purchases to feed the ad platform enough data. so, the second is a leading KPI that has a strong correlation to CAC. ideally, this is something like "QSO" - qualified sales opportunity, or "SQL" - sales qualified lead. your main goal in your ads is to hit KPI on those metrics. when you do, it's time to scale.
4. only testing micro variations of what's already working in your ad account is a quick way to hit a plateau. meta wants net-new creatives. off the wall ideas with new actors, backgrounds, visual hooks. the more off the wall shotgun testing you can do, the faster you'll find new concepts that work, which opens the door to scale.
5. waiting for your ads to fatigue before testing new ones = waiting to go to the dentist when you have a root canal. an ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure. the best time to find a winner is while you already have one winning.
6. targeting doesn't really matter. 80%+ of our spend this year was either fully ADV+ targeting or ADV+ targeting with a layered in interest stack or LAL stack. at the end of the day, this is the direction it's going, so learn to adapt and prioritize creative over targeting.
7. work smarter, not harder. instead of producing 100 net new videos that are untested, and most will fail, try this: test 100 static image callouts, find the 5-10 that work, then use that data to inform your video creation. you'll save time, money, and energy + you'll find winning angles faster.
8. a strong organic presence makes paid ads 10x easier. the brands we run that have millions of followers, strong social media teams, and produce YT content are by far our top performing. nothing can replace a strong organic brand, and adding paid only improves organic presence across the board.
9. CPMs are a tax you pay for having bad ads, a bad funnel, and bad messaging in a niche where your competition is doing better than you. either fix those things or make your economics work with high CPMs.
10. the fastest way to kill a high ticket brand is having marketing and sales get into finger pointing blame games. never hire an agency or sales person that has a habit of blaming the sales team or vice versa.
hope this helps
Ethan Bence retweeted
I’ve optimized $5 billion in ecom revenue over 12+ years… and now spent 2,000 hours putting ALL my knowledge PUBLISHED IN A BOOK!!!
Yes, you read that right.
My first book, "Billion Dollar Websites" drops November 4th.
In my 12+ years, I’ve invented CRO frameworks, playbooks, copywriting formulas, and consumer psychology strategies that don't exist anywhere else.
This is more than a book. There’s QR codes throughout the entire book, so you’ll also get
-Short + actionable checklists that take <5 min for big-time wins
-Swipe files, checklists, templates before they go public
-Play-by-play wins from elite ecommerce sites
If you ask me any question about CRO, on November 4th my answer will be to read Billion Dollar Websites. There’s nothing I know that isn’t in this book.
I'm so confident this will improve your net profit that if it doesn't… I'll refund the book AND donate $1,000 to a charity of your choice.
That's how much I believe in what's inside. Lowkey dream that this is the next Cashvertising for you.
No one got rich by writing a book. This is a labor of love to the 150+ authors whose books I’ve read and changed MY life.
You can buy it November 4th - If you want early access, join my newsletter → dylanander.com/newsletter
Always fun talking marketing w my dawgs
i’ve worked with 70+ funnels in the last year and the ones that scale all do the same 3 things differently
>they don’t chase more leads, they chase better data
>they don’t just test headlines, they test user intent
>and they don’t start with the landing page, they start closest to the sale
the teams that grow consistently all think in this order:
optimize bottom → top (booking → vsl → lp)
measure by incremental revenue, not opt-in rate
change messaging to qualify, not just convert
CRO isn’t about getting more people through the funnel
it’s about making sure the right people make it through
did a full breakdown with @ethanbence ... interview’s in my bio.
Ethan Bence retweeted
i’ve worked with 70+ funnels in the last year and the ones that scale all do the same 3 things differently
>they don’t chase more leads, they chase better data
>they don’t just test headlines, they test user intent
>and they don’t start with the landing page, they start closest to the sale
the teams that grow consistently all think in this order:
optimize bottom → top (booking → vsl → lp)
measure by incremental revenue, not opt-in rate
change messaging to qualify, not just convert
CRO isn’t about getting more people through the funnel
it’s about making sure the right people make it through
did a full breakdown with @ethanbence ... interview’s in my bio.
Ethan Bence retweeted
Today we’re introducing Heatmap Web Analytics!
Let me guess… you’re frustrated with GA4, stuck setting up custom code, and getting delayed (often inaccurate) data? Miss good ol’ UA?
Ecommerce friends, now you have it back and SO MUCH MORE.
Here’s how:
1️⃣ 2 minutes to install, NO CUSTOM CODE.
You shouldn’t need developers just to see your web analytics! Everything will work for you, out of the box, with a single copy-paste. I had my mom install it on a Shopify store to make sure it was easy lol. If she can do it, I believe in you!
2️⃣ Just the reports that matter
You can get lost in the weeds of charts and tables, but Heatmap’s web analytics are just like UA. You have the most important charts, tables, and funnels with as many filters as you want. Fully customizable, and we’re guiding you right to your source of revenue loss.
3️⃣ AI that SLAPS
HeatmapAI is KNOWN as one of the most powerful recommendation engines in the CRO space, and we had to double-down. It’s backed by trillions of datapoints and obnoxiously clear on exactly what you need to do to make more 💰
4️⃣ ZERO cookies or PII
Heatmap proudly uses no cookies, abides by every bit of GDPR, and will likely be the most compliant software in your tech stack. We’re here for a decade, not for a year. Come join us.
5️⃣ Only $29 bucks a month!
Yes… Our Web Analytics are $29/month, no matter how large your company is. Web analytics are a foundation for any successful Ecommerce business so we want to make sure you have them. We’ve got features 10x more powerful, but not 10x the price either. Start with Heatmap’s web analytics, fall in love, and we’ll grow together. We ship new features every month.
GO SIGN UP! Heatmap .com orrrrr more fun???
If you’re still reading, I’ll take a minute to say hi 👋
I’m Dylan, the founder of Heatmap (dot) com. I recently built and sold one of the largest CRO agencies and optimized billions in Ecommerce revenue. I’m working like im 21 again (I’m not 😅) building Heatmap, because this data needs to be everywhere and accessible for the Ecommerce community. Every ecom brand growing in 2025 focuses on their website for growth.
I personally invested 7-figures of my own money into this vision. Now we’re a rockstar team of 52. I’m the one who gets the pleasure of writing this tweet, but there’s 51 AMAZING, talented, dedicated team members who made this product release happen, even more than me.
And if you’re STILL reading, you’re just awesome and I think we’re friends by now lol my DMs are open, I’m always happy to support, and GO SIGN UP!
WEB ANALYTICS ARE BACK!!!
I have no idea what converts anymore.
The more split tests we run… the less I feel I’m able to predict what’s going to win. I genuinely don’t know anymore.
And I think that’s a good thing. The Dunning Krueger effect is finally rearing its’ head I guess.
Here are some recent tests that LOST that “should have” won based off conventional wisdom/common sense:
Image vs. video on a book a call page. Funny enough, this one was an accident at first. When uploading the video, we accidentally put a thumbnail instead of the video. Turns out, that won. In order to validate the results, we ran the test twice again and… you guessed it, same thing. Image beat video.
Usually everyone says “video converts better!” yea… not always.
Another one - on an upsell page for book a call, we’re noticing the same thing. Having no video is converting better than having an objectively good video that does an amazing job of framing the call.
If you would’ve asked me to bet money on either of these before, I would have absolutely said video was going to win out. Without a doubt.
Headlines? My “favorite” out of 4 we test loses plenty of times. Sometimes the most basic, least “copywritten” headline wins by a huge margin.
We are testing a headline on an opt in right now - I think the control is objectively better, but it’s losing by 25% to one of the variants.
Takeaway: best practices aren’t always best for you…
When someone tells you something is GUARANTEED to convert better… be very wary unless it’s an extremely pedantic thing (e.g. a working buy button works better than a broken buy button)
I can’t tell you what test will win… but I can tell you that if you consistently test your business will win.
One of my favorite things about CRO is seeing how much money “good ideas” that actually don’t convert would cost a business if implemented directly
Membership businesses have pretty simple metrics. We care about two main ones for a quick snapshot of the business:
- Members added
- Members lost
When you’re consistently adding members, the most insidious but often-slept-on metric is monthly churn.
Your churn will tell you your theoretical maximum MRR.
If you’re adding 400 members a month with a 12% monthly churn, your maximum amount of members is 3333 actives.
At that point you’re adding 333 and losing 333 every month.
So we either need to reduce churn, increase members added, or both.
At a certain point, you CAN’T outrun your churn. It’ll become financially infeasible to add more members. And churn usually doesn’t get better as memberships grow
Sooo… solving churn sooner rather than later is usually in your best interest.
As always… the BEST thing you can do is talk to your customers - on the phone is best. Literally just talking to your customers will give you more information and guidance than any expert can.
Members churn when they are confused, don’t have clear next steps, and feel isolated.
Having unscalable conversations will tell you exactly what is lacking.
We had a client add over 700 members to his paid membership with a live challenge.
The best thing about info products is that you can utilize the same knowledge and just change the mechanism of delivery of that knowledge.
Have an evergreen video course that’s selling?
You can turn it into:
✅ A physical book
✅ A live challenge
✅ An ebook PDF
✅ A cohort-based program
✅ One-day workshop
They each have benefits and drawbacks.
Example: a live challenge is going to allow you to spend a ton of time with the people that attend and their conversion rate to your backend offers will almost certainly be really high. But the hard part is getting them to show up
Some people like to read, others like to listen, others like to follow along and do.
None is “better” than the other - it just reaches a different segment of people and has a different ration of frontend acquisition to backend conversion.
I like to think of funnels/different products like an investment portfolio
Some will get you easy customer acquisition, but lower margin
Some will be a bit harder to acquire a customer, but get you directly into a high LTV subscription
Very rarely should you be all in on one
The buyer journey is NOT linear!
Unless you have a service business/talk to your customers every day, it’s really easy to forget how non-linear it actually is
See ad -> click -> buy is the exception, not the rule
I was talking with one of our clients earlier this week and it’s always nice to have a reminder of how customers can become customers.
In their case - someone came to their office because their boss had seen an ad a few months before, thought it’d be a fit, screenshotted it, and then sent it to that person.
They came into the office and bought same day.
Stuff like that happens alllll the time. The thing is that if you aren’t talking to customers, you won’t know that.
Always good to remind yourself of this when you’re looking at your ad spend.
How many problems can your product solve?
Have you listed them all out?
Have you tested landing pages for each?
The same product can solve multiple problems and often times is what really unlocks scale
Call out your market avatar in your headlines and in your images and your conversion rates will thank you
I'm not gonna say every info product seller needs a backend membership but.... every info product seller needs a backend membership
Split Testing and CRO are a force multiplier if you have a low-ticket frontend info product with a subscription/high ticket on the backend.
If you sell something on the backend that has an LTV of $500, $5,000, or $50,000, you may not get excited about a measly 17% increase in your frontend $29 funnel.
But that’s a mistake.
Let’s say you sell a $29 product on the frontend and a $39 per month subscription on the backend.
25% of those frontend buyers convert to a subscription.
The subscription has a 10 month LTV which means each subscriber is worth $390 on average.
If you get 30 buyers per day on that product, a 17% increase in buyers means you’ll get 5.1 more buyers per day. Again, maybe not that exciting to you, but it should be.
When you increase your conversion rate by 17%, like a client of ours did here, you’re not just getting 17% more frontend buyers.
You’re getting 17% more backend buyers as well.
So now instead of getting 225 subscribers per month, you’re getting 263 per month.
That’s $1.4k in incremental monthly recurring revenue from a slight bump in frontend CVR.
Don’t sleep on split testing your info funnel.
