Performance marketing (ad creative, Meta ads, measurement)
Synthesised from Dara Denney, Motion (creative analytics, 2025–2026 talks), Smart Marketer and Mobile Dev Memo
(Eric Seufert). Mostly ecommerce/DTC practice; for app-specific UA read app-user-acquisition, for landing pages
landing-pages-and-copy. Numbers come from individual accounts and agencies — treat them as starting points, not laws.
Core playbook
- Diagnose before you produce: one or two sentences on what the account is missing (persona, format, awareness level). → Diagnosing an ad account's creative gaps before producing new ads
- Research the moment the problem shows up, not abstract pain points; document why-buy / why-believe per product. → Customer research for ad creative — generations, micro-moments, emotions, The Motivator Map — hero product, value-prop testing, why buy vs why believe
- Creative is the targeting: go broad (inputs are only suggestions), define audience segments, exclude customers; fix proven demographic/placement problems with value rules, not restrictions; reach new people with genuinely different concepts, not near-copies. → Broad targeting vs interests, lookalikes and retargeting on Meta (2023 → 2026), Meta audience segments — proving remarketing happens on its own, Meta value rules — bid more for people worth more (instead of restricting targeting), Creative similarity and "entity IDs" — why 30 ads can get one ad's worth of delivery
- Creative is a hits business: ~1 in 100 new ads becomes a whale, so ship enough diverse ads (and several creative sources) for the odds to work. Build diversity in order: formats → awareness levels → desires → personas. → Creative diversity after Meta Andromeda — the five levels, Creative hit rate — what the spend data says and why Barry Hott calls it misleading, Running several creative partners and keeping a creative culture that avoids sameness
- Hooks stop, target and lead into the story; change the visual first, cut the “so what?” moment, and carry relevance from the first frame through to the landing page and homepage. → Anatomy of an ad hook — three jobs, layers, and fit-in-then-stand-out, Verbal and text hook templates that are winning on Meta (2025–2026), Visual and skit hook formats for UGC ads (2025–2026), Ad storytelling and the "so what?" test — what founders and Barry Hott say makes ads scale, Ad relevance and the relevance chain — first frame to landing page to homepage
- S-tier formats today: founder, partnership/creator and VSL-style ads; put partnership ads at 30–50% of spend. Cheap phone-shot formats still win, and AppLovin needs 45–60 s stories with the CTA at the end. → Meta ad creative formats ranked — Dara Denney's 51-format tier list (Aug 2026), Founder ads — why they win and how to make them, Partnership (whitelisted) ads and choosing creators who convert, Low-budget UGC ad formats that keep winning — Savannah Sanchez's swipe file, AppLovin ad creative for e-commerce — longer stories, back-loaded CTAs, end cards and volume
- Start simple, add structure only for a proven problem; low volume = one campaign, one ad set, optimise for the purchase; give new ads spend with push delivery / the testing tool or a separate testing campaign at higher spend (practitioners disagree — say so); optimise for value/qualified leads; prefer min-ROAS over cost-per-result goals once you have volume. → Starting a new or low-volume Meta ad account — the simplest setup that can work, How Meta ads strategy changes from $100 to $100,000 a month, How to structure a Meta ads account in 2025–2026, Meta creative testing setups at $5K, $50K and $1M+ per month, Getting spend onto new Meta ads — push delivery vs the creative testing tool, How many ads per ad set, and the minimum budget for a Meta campaign, Choosing what Meta optimises for — "Meta is literal" (lead quality, value, funnel events), Meta bid strategy — minimum ROAS vs cost per result goal vs lowest cost
- Launch in batches on a fixed cadence, judge the ad set in aggregate after 7–14 days (breakdown effect), optimise only on primary metrics; don’t reflexively turn ads off. → Weekly Meta media-buying cadence and attribution settings, The breakdown effect — judge Meta results at the ad-set level, not per ad, Fixing Meta underspend — CTC's four phases, and why they never turn off ads, Which Meta ad metrics to track, and how to read them
- Find the broken stage before fixing: no conversions = offer; weak hook/CTR = creative; high CTR + low CVR = page; many unprofitable conversions = business model. A “fatigued” ad is often remarketing exhaustion — check the segment breakdown. → Diagnosing why a Meta ad isn't working (metric-pattern cheatsheet), Reading creative metrics — spend, thumbstop/hook rate, hold rate, CTR, conversion, Is it really creative fatigue? Diagnosing a Meta ad's performance drop, Landing pages for Meta ads — congruency, listicles and sales pages
- Mostly new concepts, some iterations; scale only clear winners that hold among new audiences on 1-day click/incremental results; raise budgets in steps (or small automated rules) to find the ceiling — don’t duplicate campaigns. → Iterating on winning ads and the weekly hook-testing cadence, When to iterate on a winning Meta ad vs make a net-new concept, Scaling a Meta ad from signal to winner, How to raise a Meta campaign's budget — automated rules, stepped increases and the scaling ceiling
- Plan to the capacity you have: size monthly volume as the spend gap ÷ expected spend per new ad, and judge creative sources by the spend their ads carry, not by hit rate or warm-audience ROAS. → Brand reality — production capacity, true creative cost and team alignment, Planning Meta creative volume, budget and team, How many new ads do you need per month? CTC's creative demand formula and carry rate, Judging creatives — spend and cold-audience results over in-platform ROAS
- Fix the signal first: audit what conversions reach the platforms (events firing on page load, wrong optimisation event); pixel + CAPI, deduplicated, EMQ ≥7, reconciled to orders; send server-side to your 1–3 main platforms. → Signal engineering — auditing and shaping the conversion events ad platforms optimise on, Conversions API (CAPI) — why server-side conversion feedback matters
- Last-click is fine while small and on 1–2 channels; beyond that treat platform ROAS as biased and test incrementality. In Meta, break results down by attribution setting and consider the incremental attribution model before scaling or pausing. → When last-click attribution is good enough (and when to invest in incrementality), How last-click attribution biases channel results, Meta's incremental attribution model — should you switch from standard?, Designing incrementality tests (duration, budget, CTV and brand)
Note map
Ad creative
Meta ads
Measurement
Gaps
- TikTok Ads, Google/YouTube Ads and AppLovin setup in depth (only touched on).
- B2B performance marketing; email/SMS and retention marketing.
- Several sources are ecommerce-only — app-specific nuances (SKAN, MMPs) live in
app-user-acquisitionand the measurement notes. - Parts of two Motion/Dara transcripts were garbled by speech-to-text (noted inside the affected Meta notes).