1/ What causes long term sustained performance in an ad account?

🧵featuring real examples 👇🏻

If you explore the source of FB ad growth and subsequently revenue growth for eCom brands it is almost never a function of iterative improvements to ad creative or tactics over time.

2/ More often it is a series of moments that unlock an order of magnitude increase in awareness, engagement, traffic and performance.

These moments can be caused by:

A single ad
A big PR moment
A breakthrough campaign
A change in market dynamics
A new product release
Etc.
3/ The problem is they are very hard to predict and create.

I’ll give you an example of a few that happened for us @QALORing that changed our trajectory (and ad account performance) each time...
4/ The first was @andydalton14 wearing a ring on @HBO hard knocks. It was the peak of the series popularity and they did a :30 piece on the ring he was wearing while playing.

See screenshot

Notice the traffic before and after the peak.
5/ This increased organic traffic let us alter our AdWords strategy, extract more post intent demand from new searchers and pull clips of the show to supplement our ad credibility.
6/ The next major moment was an ESPN article that we turned into a FB ad.

This article: https://t.co/yQ4Jopt0IE

Was turned into this ad:
https://t.co/b1JvPJThKx

That DOUBLED our prospecting performance for 2 months during Holiday.

We didn’t solicit the ad, we just responded
6/ Another step factor growth came from a campaign/product release we did in partnership with Crossfit and a charity called @barbells_usa.

It was an awesome multi channel campaign.

And again you can see the spike in traffic that is sustained from that moment on.
7/ I have seen this “progressive peaking” play out over and over for brands that sustain growth and efficiency.

It’s these observations that form the foundation for my “4 Peaks Theory”

https://t.co/Ea71pFWc11
8/ Many see small iterative creative changes and tactical improvement over time as how you win.

And that can help.

But time and time again I see the causal chain move the other way.

Great marketing, stories, products and moments drive ad account success. Not the other way.

More from Tech

A common misunderstanding about Agile and “Big Design Up Front”:

There’s nothing in the Agile Manifesto or Principles that states you should never have any idea what you’re trying to build.

You’re allowed to think about a desired outcome from the beginning.

It’s not Big Design Up Front if you do in-depth research to understand the user’s problem.

It’s not BDUF if you spend detailed time learning who needs this thing and why they need it.

It’s not BDUF if you help every team member know what success looks like.

Agile is about reducing risk.

It’s not Agile if you increase risk by starting your sprints with complete ignorance.

It’s not Agile if you don’t research.

Don’t make the mistake of shutting down critical understanding by labeling it Bg Design Up Front.

It would be a mistake to assume this research should only be done by designers and researchers.

Product management and developers also need to be out with the team, conducting the research.

Shared Understanding is the key objective


Big Design Up Front is a thing to avoid.

Defining all the functionality before coding is BDUF.

Drawing every screen and every pixel is BDUF.

Promising functionality (or delivery dates) to customers before development starts is BDUF.

These things shouldn’t happen in Agile.
So we had to develop technologies like this to barely manage control over limited areas in Iraq's few urban centers. Only ~8 in 100 Iraqi adults owns a personal vehicle. That rate is > 1 car/adult in America yet I have never seen any doctrine paper or work of fiction address this


We've seen and struggled in civil conflicts with instant, local, universal, distributed communications (cell phone era, basically every conflict since 2000). We've seen and struggled in conflicts with instant, global, universal distributed communications (everything since 2011).

The world's most overfunded military and glow in the dark agencies struggle and largely fail to contain conflicts where fhe vast, vast majority of people are locked into a ~5mi radius of their home.

How can they possibly contain a conflict in a nation with universal car ownership and the most developed road network in the world? The average car can travel over 400 miles on one tank of gas, how can you contain the potential of that kind of mobility?

I think that's partially why the system was so freaked out by 1/6. Yes, most of it is histrionics but you don't decide to indefinitely turn your capital into the Baghdad Green Zone with fortifications and 25k troops over histrionics alone.

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