TEA 252: The 4-Level Meta Ad Testing Ladder (Know What To Build Next)

The number one question we get from ecommerce founders running Meta ads is the same every single day: what do I test next? After 15 to 20 hours of think time, thousands of optimization sessions, and hundreds of ad accounts, Josh built one framework that answers it for good. It's called the Ad Testing Ladder.

In this audio-exclusive episode, Josh walks through the exact four-level system he uses to know what Meta ad to build next, climbing from the cheapest variable to the most expensive so every batch you launch drives the creative diversity Meta rewards.

Inside this episode:

• The four rungs of the Ad Testing Ladder and why you should never skip one before you've exhausted the rung you're standing on
• Level 1, angles: the core argument your ad actually makes, and the simple rule for telling whether you have a real angle or just a hook in disguise
• The FOCUS framework our head coach built for generating unlimited angles from your ideal customer (five lenses that turn one product into infinite ad ideas)
• The 4 types of hooks every founder should know, including the two you can use in images and the two you can only pull off in video
• Level 3, styles: founder story, unboxing, before and after, advertorial, and how to source the right one in minutes using the Meta Ads Library or Atria
• Why Josh tells every client to start with image ads instead of video, and the one kind of brand where images are 70% of everything that works
• The exact weekly testing cadence we teach: how many ads, what kind of campaign, every single week no matter what
• How one subscription box client climbed from 700 subscribers to over 1,850 while raising prices 30% and scaling from $150 a day to over $1,000 a day profitably

This is the same framework hundreds of our clients are about to get in a massive system rollout, complete with examples, visuals, and how-tos. If you've ever stared at your ad account wondering what to build next, this is the episode that makes the answer obvious.

🚀 Want to see what this looks like applied to your business, with our team, our trainings, and the systems we use to scale ecommerce brands? Go to the Work With Us page: https://ecommercealley.com/work-with-us ⭐ Loved this episode? Drop us a rating because we're going for #1 ecommerce podcast in the world and every single rating moves the needle.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

All right, our ad testing system four levels. Welcome to another audio-only episode of the e commerce Alley podcast. My name is Josh Coffee, and I'm the founder of eCommerce Alley, where we for the last nearly 13 years have been working hand in hand with e-commerce brands, helping them scale their companies from wherever they're at to wherever the next level is, and then how to push beyond that. And we teach lots of marketing frameworks. We particularly focus in on meta-ads, which is what this episode today is going to be about. And this is going to be about an ad testing ladder that you climb in order to scale your ads in the most efficient way. Because one of the number one questions that we receive every single day from the hundreds of clients we work with is what do I text text? What do I test next? And so I want to help you solve that because there are so many different things you can do. And if you're a client listening, you may have heard me talk about the three dials that you can turn between product, message, and creative. But I'll tell you what, I'm going to be introducing you to a new framework that we call the ad testing ladder that I'm really, really excited about because this is a sneak peek to what many of our clients are going to be getting on July 2nd, which is an entire huge system rollout of all kinds of things that we're seeing work on meta, this framework with tons of examples, visuals, how-tos, etc. But what I want to do is I want to share this framework with anybody who feels like they struggle with knowing what to build next with their ads. Do I do video? Do I do image? What types of images? What types of videos? Where do hooks come in? How do I do messaging, et cetera? And this is a way to do it. Because as I sat down, and when I actually sat down to create this, by the way, this is a brain child that I've been working on. And it's probably taking me, I mean, it has to be 15 to 20 hours of think time. And when I mean think time, I mean literal think time. Going and studying what are the order that we see the fastest companies grow that we work with? What are the things that we're doing that we see work with? How do I know what to create next? Which, you know, I have the benefit of I've done thousands of optimization sessions. We have, we optimize hundreds of ad accounts with clients every single month. And we've done this for so long. So, like naturally, I could just look at a campaign, I could look at ads, and I could say, ooh, this is the next thing to chase. This is the next thing to do, and let's build it in this style. Here's going to be a good hook, et cetera. But it's not very firsthand knowledge to most people. And so sometimes I take that for granted. But even sometimes I find myself stuck and I'm just like, what do I need to build next? Because I still build, I'd say 7, 60 to 70% of the content that goes out for the e-commerce alley regarding advertising and, of course, all the organic is me. And so I still build creative inside our company. And I are honestly, it's one of the most compounding leveraged things you could do as a founder. So don't try to get out of it. You should try to just get better at it and learn to love it. So all that said, I'm gonna be walking through a four-level ad testing ladder that is an order you should test in a way that the each level is essentially what I would consider a rung. And the goal is to climb from the cheapest variable to the most expensive variable, and you exhaust the run, the rung that you're on before you climb to the next. Because if you could do this, this ladder is gonna drive diversity within each batch of ads that you're doing, which is probably the thing you hear. Like, well, you need diversity, diversity in your ads. And and this is going to help you do that. And it's gonna allow you to take different swings at meta from different angles in a certain way from the bottom. And so we're gonna start at the base and we're gonna climb through each of these four levels as we go. But before I dive into that, I want to share a really cool story that happened with one of our clients earlier this week, where I'm I'm packing up to leave the office one of these days, and I'm walking out, I'm I'm heading out, and I look to my left, and Isaac, who's our client success director, he's he's working with, he's on a call on Zoom with one of our clients, Julie. And Julie, I met Julie a couple years ago, I think it was almost two years ago-ish, and she runs a subscription box and she's on the call, and Isaac kind of mapping out, we do 90-day game plans with our clients. So every 90 days we set priorities, we set revenue, profit objectives, gross profit margin objectives, ad spend objectives, and then we go and we build up, we determine what priorities and projects we need to tackle in order to do that. Well, anyway, I stop in and I talked to I talked to Julie and I asked her how the business was doing. And so we're just talking for a few minutes, and she tells me they they just crossed 1,850 box subscribers, which is pretty incredible. But the crazy thing is when I met Julie, she was like 700 subscribers, and so we're talking like over 1100 new subscribers. And so I kind of got curious, and like later that night, uh Julie, if you're listening, I was just kind of curious to know where you started. I'm like, hey, I want to go see what our first conversation was like. So I went into our CRM and I go to and I see the note from the very first conversation that was had two years almost two years ago, and I look at it, and her AOV at the time was $50, and now it's $65. So she like more than doubled her subscriber base from 700-ish to adding $1,100 plus more. She increased her pricing by 30%. And her ad spend back in the day on the note we took was about $100, $150 a day. And now she's spending well over $1,000 per day profitably on day one, which is pretty crazy in the subscription box world. And on top of that, she was telling me on the call, she said, Yeah, also we sold out of the next month's box. I literally either we have to wait list people, we have to shut off ads, or we have to like pre-sell the September box for two months from now, which is a fun problem to have. And those are the good things you get to solve at certain levels in business. And I share this because that's what happens when you prioritize the one thing that most people put off and that is gonna really move the needle in your business, and that is acquisition. And when I think of acquisition for e-commerce, meta-ads is number one. And so you have to obsess over your messaging, offers, pricing, ads, et cetera. Everything that comes through meta-ads, you have to get really good at, but it's really freaking hard. It takes a lot of work. And all of this, by the way, is to preface that what I'm gonna cover today is a lot of work. Julie did a lot of work and she was able to grow substantially through doing a lot of work, but she had to prioritize the time to do the thing. So, what I'm gonna share is a lot of work. And to do it is going to take time, and there's no way around it. The only thing you could do is go forward and take the next step and do the next thing. So, all that said, I'm encouraging you that as I cover this, know that you can do it. You can do it. If you say I'm not a designing person, Josh, yes, I'm not a designing person either. I wasn't a designing person, I learned some skills. I'm still not, but you know what? AI makes it really, really easy. So a lot of the stuff I'm gonna talk about, I'm gonna I'm gonna talk through how to exhaust the cheapest way to do it to the most expensive. So image ads, for example, are cheap. Video ads are expensive from a time and if you're working with creators, dollars standpoint. And so I'm gonna walk you through the cheapest to the most expensive. And what I want to say is when we're doing this, there are four levels, and I'm gonna give you the four levels. The first level are is angle testing, the second level is hook testing, the third level is style testing of the ads, and the fourth level is format testing. So uh format, by the way, is image or video. The reason that's at the top is because I recommend that you start testing with images. They're faster to create. AI is very, very good at them. I did a workshop for all of our clients. If you're a client in the alley or the Max Profits Metership, go to workshops and go to replays. We did a 90-minute workshop like two weeks ago on AI with creative. And so if you're strong at video, though, and you're listening to this, you're like, Josh, I create a lot of video already. Great, that's fine. Start with what you feel the best at. But images, you can do angle testing and hook testing, by the way. People don't believe you can do have a hook in an image. Yes, there are hooks in images. There are four types of hooks, and I'm gonna talk about them. And then styles, there are infinite styles. And so an angle, let me break down what they are. Level one are angles. This is the core argument that an ad is gonna make. It's basically like this specific problem or belief that you're attacking and why your product is the answer. For example, you could say your adult acne isn't a skincare problem, which is kind of contrarian. A lot of people think that it's a skincare problem. And you could say your adult acne isn't a skincare problem, it's a gut problem. So that's like the angle, right? We're saying acne is not a skin problem, it's a gut problem. Boom. That's a contrarian angle. Now, here's the thing: there are a lot of ways to say that, which goes to level two. And these are hooks. Okay, this is the first thing that's gonna basically stop the scroll and get someone to relate to the thing right away. So the same angle can have different hooks. And there are four types of hooks, by the way. There are visual hooks. A visual hook is something that like just stops the scroll because it's visually gonna like grab you there. This is where like you'll see some people in their videos, the camera will just like turn to the side and suddenly they're in it. That's a that's called a visual hook. If someone like it like a video starts and they jump down into the screen, that's a visual hook. If you have an image that's just eye stopping and it's like, whoa, what's going on here? That's a visual hook. Basically, every image is a visual, by the way. Then you have text hooks, which is like an overlay of text on the actual graphic or the video. Then you have a verbal hook. Now you can only do this in videos, of course, where there's a certain sound effect or something. And then you have an audio, or I'm sorry, a verbal hook is what you actually say. It's the first thing that you say. And then audio hook is like a sound effect or something. So there are four types of hooks. You have visual, text, verbal, and audio hooks. And I say this because images can have visual and text hooks. Videos can have vi all four visual, text, verbal, and audio. All right, so let's look, let's go back to the skincare thing. An angle could be your adult acne isn't a skincare problem, it's a gut problem. So essentially the the the nutshell would be acne is a gut problem. That would be like how I would just simplify it, right? There's a lot of ways to say it. A hook could be, are you still breaking out at 32? It's not your face wash. Or you could say, the why your this 200, your $200 skincare routine isn't fixing your acne. Right? So like those are different ways to say that thing. And I'll give you another one. I'm gonna give you one from one of our clients for many years, Pacific Hound. So Pacific Hound sells dog scarves. And the single angle that has well, one angle that has done well for her is is villainizing bandanas. Like bandanas, for example, don't stay put on an active dog. Like that's an angle, right? Bandanas don't stay put. That would be an angle. And so she's she's selling a dog scarf, but she's kind of villainizing bandanas in the process of doing that and making it the obvious upgrade. And so if I look at the angle, the angle could be bandanas don't stay put. That's like the high-level angle. It's like a category. I want you to think of it as an umbrella, right? There are many different ways we can say that thing. Here are a few examples. Hook number one could be how many times have you retied your dog's bandana on a single walk? Another one, you tie the bandana, your dog shakes it, and now it looks like a necklace. Another one, POV, the bandana made it to the the bandana actually didn't make it to the end of the driveway. Another one, number four, your your dog isn't isn't too wild for a bandana, the bandana just wasn't built to stay on. Okay, number five, if your dog's bandana spends more time around their leg than their neck, this isn't for you. So there is so many ways to say the angle. So the kind of rule of thumb is if you can say this concept in at least 10 or more ways, then it's an angle. If you say the thing and there's no other way to say it beyond the thing, then it's probably just a hook to a larger angle. So I want you to think of angles as almost topical things in areas that you can speak to your customers, or kind of like buckets. And then the hooks are the many different pebbles or things that you can put in the buckets. And so there's a really good, I did not create this, but there's a really good framework that you can use for this. And I say I didn't create this because our head of coaching community and also who does tons of our marketing, Robert, on our team, he created a framework that I want to share with you that it actually was really, really good. And so, Robert, I love you. I stole this for the episode to share with them and share with all of our clients uh in the upcoming trainings. And it's it's when it comes to finding an angle, I want you to think of focus. F stands for frustration. What are they sick of dealing with? So when you're thinking of what kind of angles could I pursue with my ads, you would say, what kind of frustration are people sick of dealing with that my stuff can help with? The O stands for outcome. What outcomes do they want, right? What is the desired outcome that they would have that my product could help solve? The C stands for constraint. What is actually blocking the customer from making progress? Maybe it's like a missing system, a tool. There's knowledge, there's some infrastructure, there's something that's stopping them or making them feel stuck, even though they want some kind of a result. The U stands for unspoken cost. Like what's helping them stay stuck? Like what's the problem that's quietly costing them something? Like it could be costing them wasted money, lost time, missed opportunities, lower confidence, added stress, or maybe even freedom that they have to give up by not solving their problem. This is the unspoken cost. And the final one is the S in the word focus, which is skepticism. This is basically the customer's doubt, maybe their distrust or or exhaustion because they've tried all these things and it just didn't work. And basically, this is where the angles you create under skepticism is what meets them where they are and gives them a reason to consider. Like what are the things that they no longer believe that your thing could that you could actually create ads around it and then help them believe? And so I want you to think of focus when you think of angles. So I say this because angles are the foundation, they are at level one. Start to think in terms of angles. I'll give you an example. For us, an angle that works is being burned by an agency. We call it the burned by an agency angle. We can say that in so many different ways. There are many ways we could say that, and we do because we create tons of ads around it, and it works really well for us because our customers have felt that. And that is a frustration-based, a frustration-based angle. So when you think of angles, think of focus, frustration, outcome, constraint, unspoken cost, or skepticism. That's going to get you going, and you could feed this into AI, it'll help you brainstorm more, and then say, what are some angles from my ideal customer that is a frustration that my product solves? Boom. You get a lot of high-level ideas. And then once you have a high-level idea, kind of like bandanas don't stay put on an active dog, then you could go deeper and say, what are maybe five specifically unique hooks that I could write in like a headline format essentially for this thing. And then once I write those, I will then move to the next level of styles and say, what's one style of ad? Like, by the way, there are infinite styles. Like styles are just different ways to present your ads within a format. So like trends come and go, and styles will keep changing. So that's why I say they are infinite. And like common ones are like founder story, unboxing, testimonial, social proof, before and after, which is just a comparison, like us versus them. Uh, you could have ugly ads, you could have day in the life, behind the scenes, green screen, lifestyle, advertorial. I mean, there are product demo, there are infinite styles out there. And honestly, the way that I find a style of an ad that I think would do well with certain hooks is I'll just use a tool like Atria or the Medads library. I'll find some inspiration of that, and then we'll just we'll just recreate something with the hook on it. If you're doing image, you should use a text to have some kind of a hook. If you're doing video, it's very easy. You just write a different opener for the video. You record the video with the opener, but the back half of the video is basically the same. Just the first five to ten seconds is different. And so pick one style, and it depends on what you're you're testing. You only want to you generally want to focus on one at a time. So if you're testing angles, pick one format. So like image, again, image is what I start with. Pick one style, it could be lifestyle images, then pick maybe uh one generic hook, and then pick a lot of different angles that you might be able to say it, and then say the angles on it. Or I'm sorry, each angle will just have one hook because you're just trying to test angles. So you would create an angle and like one angle could be like, hey, the bandanas don't say put on a dog. Another angle could be the knot comes untied once you put a bandana on. Another angle could be it could be that it gets wrinkled and you can't unwrinkle it. Another one could be, hey, the bandana gets wet and it gets really stinky. So those are all unique angles, right? And when you're angle testing, just come up with whatever you, whatever you can think of that's relevant to that. And that's your hook, right? So just come up with a relevant hook for that angle. But once you go test this and you start to find some, you will start to find some trends. I promise. You will start to find trends in some kind of an angle that works. And then you go deeper in that. And so I'm just gonna walk you through an example of like a ladder in action here. So if I was testing some different angles for Pacific Count, I could say maybe there's bandanas, let's say put on a dog, they get wrinkled, they get wet and they start to stink, they're a pain to tie while the dog is squirming around, and then maybe cheap bandanas just wear out and they cost more over time. Let's say that bandanas don't stay put on a dog wins. Well, now the next batch of ads that I launch the next week are gonna be with that angle, and I'm gonna go think of all these hooks. Like I said earlier, how many times have you tried to retie it? You know, you put it on and they shake it once and it falls down like a necklace, et cetera. I'd come up with like five different hooks. And then I would build in all the ads that I would create, it would all be bucketed as like that's the angle, but we would have different hooks. And if it's an image hook, the images, by the way, they will be different, but they will be the same style. So let's say when I went to test that hook, I chose lifestyle images because we meta still wants diversity. So I'm not saying take one image, the same identical image, and just change the text. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is pick a style of ad, like maybe it's a lifestyle ad. Let's use that for simplicity. And you would pick five different lifestyle ads and you would overlay the hook in some capacity. If it's a video, you would film maybe one video that has the bulk of the angle in the video, and then just film like you saying the hook five different ways in the beginning, and you just slice the beginning of the video. Because you're trying to go deeper. And as we find what works, then we go to the next level. So let's say we went ahead and we tested that and we found, hey, you tie the bandana and your dog shakes it once, and now it feels like a necklace to them. Okay, great. That is the hook that works. So the next week, that the next test up is styles of ads. So we'll go get inspiration when let's say we tested lifestyle and we tried this whole problem agitate solve style video, not video, image, and then we did like, and then we did a before and after, like of before you got the bandana, like and then three minutes after, and then maybe we did we did a whole like product call, we did like call-outs on the product or something like that. We had the bandana begin in the middle with a dog and then had all kinds of calls. Now we're trying styles of ads. And let's say that we found that before and after and lifestyle limits just did really, really well. Now we move to the level four, which is let's see how these types of things would do in videos. So we would go the next week and start to create some batches of lifestyle videos with some voiceover, maybe, and then before and after videos. And so this is how you can ascend through it. Now I will say this generally, you don't need to ascend a ton of formats super duper fast. And there are and you can test a lot of these as you're kind of climbing, you just choose what makes the most sense to keep pursuing with. Sometimes you'll you might want to just sit, you're gonna usually sit on level three with different styles for a good while because you could test a boatload of different image styles before you have to go create video. But if you feel like you're getting some good momentum and you have enough that you could go build, then be like, okay, great, let's actually go build some different types of videos with some styles that we see working. And so the the goal is that you want to climb up this, but you you everything doesn't work out perfectly as far as like you have to go to video. Some brands just do better doing only images, by the way. Apparel brands, images are like 70%-ish of what apparel brands do that are really succeeding at it. So so for some people, you just say image and format never becomes something you have to ascend through and try different videos. But the goal is you work your way up. If you don't know what an angle is, I'm telling you, if you don't have good angles and hooks, it doesn't matter what styles, it means your messaging is just gonna be bad and people aren't gonna resonate no matter what. And if you think that video is the only thing that works for you right now, it might be, but maybe it's because when you've created images, you haven't really had any solid, true angles or hooks that work in images, and video just does a little bit better job describing something. And so that ends up helping. And so I say this because start with angles, images can still be a good starting guy. Now, some people maybe your product is so difficult to understand, it has so much education you can't and you have to do videos. That's okay. That's okay. But the goal is start at the lowest, angles, hooks, styles, and then go formats. And when you're thinking of angles, the biggest piece of advice I could give you when you're wondering what you should what angles you might be able to go after is think of the word focus. Frustrations, outcomes, constraints, unspoken costs, or skepticisms and things that maybe they no longer believe or what would make them skeptical about working with you and then or buying from you. And then you take those and those, I mean, you have infinite angles that you can go after. And reminder, I don't consider anything an angle if you can't write at least 10 different hooks about that angle. Because if you have something that it's like you can only say in one way, then that's what I would consider only a hook. So this is a simple ad testing uh ladder that you climb. It's a way that you can creatively scale by starting with the cheapest variable and then moving your way up. Again, we like to when we launch our batches, we like to do test batches every week. So we teach all of our clients every week launch a new batch of test ads of at least three to five ads into an ad set in a CBO campaign every single week, no matter what. And so when we go do this, we just keep testing and testing. And you might test angles for a couple weeks, and then you're gonna find some hooks, and then you start testing some hooks, and then it starts moving into styles, and you'll find that this gets easier and easier as you climb the ladders. Now, if you're listening to this and you're like, hey, Josh, this is really awesome. I would love to see what this looks like in real life, how do you apply this stuff to my business? Then you just need to click below and go to the work with us page and see what it looks like because we teach our clients how to do all kinds of stuff. And I didn't even talk about the three tiers. There are three tiers of ad spend and what we do for them. If you're under 300 a day, if you're 300 to 2000 a day, and if you're over $2,000 a day in spend, your frameworks and stuff will start to shift. The campaign structure, some of the settings, how you make moves, the creative ladder I talked about right now, or the ad testing ladder is going to remain the same. But then there are some additional levels based on where you're at. And so if you're listening, you found this valuable, two things. Number one, like this podcast, give us a give us a star rating, it helps us a lot. Number two, click the link below, go to eCommerceally.com slash work with us and just see what it kind of looks like to become one of our clients and have access to our team, have access to me, and have access to the training and the systems that we use to help scale e-commerce brands. But you've been listening to the e commerce alley podcast. Thank you. I know it wasn't Dale, it was just me today. I hope that's okay. And uh, and I'll see you in the next episode.