| Source | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kvxra7fjbh0t75yx52wjzpdd |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kvxra7fjbh0t75yx52wjzpdd |
| Readwise ID | 01kvxra7fjbh0t75yx52wjzpdd |
| Date | 2025-05-30 |
| Author | Your Average Tech Bro |
| Category | video |
| Site | YouTube |
I’m a solo app developer who just spent over $2,000 on marketing his apps on social media, primarily on Facebook, Meta, Instagram, all that jazz. And in this video, I’m going to talk about how exactly that all went and whether it was worth it or not. So, just for a little bit of clarification, I am a solo app developer, but I do have a co-founder. He’s a marketing co-founder. So, I’m not a solopreneur. I’m just the sole technical person. I do all of the building. And my co-founder, Ming Mang Duck, on social media, he is the main marketing person for organic social media primarily. But recently, we decided to try out paid ads, specifically meta ads. I have never
really done too much paid ads because I primarily in the past when I was truly a soloreneur, I only marketed my apps on organic social media. But my partner has dabbled a little bit in the paid ad space in the past when he used to do some drop shipping e-commerce stuff. So, he knows the platform a little bit better than me. So, throughout this video, he’s going to jump in here and there to explain what exactly our ad strategy was or what specifically his ad strategy was on how we ran ads for our product. And then I’ll also chime in a little bit about my general thoughts about paid ads as well. So just for some
context, what app do we run paid ads for? So we are currently building an app called perfectin.ai. It is basically a suite of tools that helps people get jobs. A lot of them are AI powered, but that’s the general gist. We have a really fast resume builder. We have an interview prepping tool as well as an interview co-pilot tool that listens in on your meetings and answers interview questions for you. So that’s the tool that we’re building and we’re in the job search market. And for the past couple of months, we’ve been pretty regularly able to hit like $1,1500 a month of revenue purely from organic social media. But then we
decided, okay, why not try out this paid ads thing? Maybe paid ads can help elevate us to the next level of users and revenue milestone. And when you think about the concept of paid ads, it sounds like a dream, like a match made in heaven. It’s like, oh my gosh, I just pay for views and then as people see my ads, maybe someone will convert. And then you can essentially theoretically if your ad and your funnel and your landing page and all that is good enough. You can theoretically create like money printer where you put in $1 and then the money printer spits out three or$4 dollars out the back. That
sounds crazy. But is it actually that easy? In my experience, no. And we’ll go a little bit more into detail as to why. So right now I’m going to switch over to my partner Mang Doug. I’ll let him do deeper dive into how exactly the campaigns were set up. All right. So we are currently chatting with my co-founder Andrew. also goes by Mangmuck on social media. He has been running paid ads for our SAS tool, Perfect Interview.AI for the past month, month and a half. Spent a little bit over two grand dropping money on paid ads. He handled everything. So, in this segment of the video, we’re just going to kind
of go over the general campaign setup. Like, there’s going to be some things that we’re going to be like, “Yeah, I don’t know why we did that. We just did it.” We’re just going to show you our exact setup, our quote unquote strategy, if we even have any. But, yeah, we’re just going to go over it all. So, Andrew, why don’t you take it away, dive into the meta ads dashboard and tell us a little bit about how everything was set up. Well, first things first, of course, there’s a strategy behind all of this. Um, it would be not great idea if we went in without any strategy at all what we’re trying to do, but Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, number one, hey guys, happy to be featured on this channel.
Very excited to talk about paid ads today. I’ll say me personally, I’m not an expert in paid ads. My expertise is mostly in organic content going viral on organic social media. I used to run a marketing agency where I basically helped like AI SAS brands go viral organically on Tik Tok, Instagram being too short. But I have a little knowledge in paid ads because in the past I used to do drop shipping which I ran a lot of ads on Facebook, Instagram and did that for pretty much two years and spent over six figures on paid ads alone. Let me
just share my screen here. So this is our dashboard for our ad account for a perfect interview. The most important thing that you want to be doing when you’re running paid ads is you first you want to start out with testing ad creatives. So the first campaign we had down here is our ad creative testing campaign. And you’re going to see a lot of ad systems in here. But the most important thing is you have campaigns, you have adsets, and then you have ad creatives. And what the campaign basically means is that that is your overarching umbrella for a campaign
you’re running, right? And then within a campaign you have different adsets. And each of these adsets generally what it means is that you’re targeting different audience pockets. So you can select audience region, audience age, audience platforms and overall meta will also help you find different audience pockets for you. Even if let’s say you have two adsets that exactly the same type of like audience targeting, they’ll also find different pockets within those each of those audience pockets. So, I like to think about adsets as like different
audience pockets. And within each adset, you can have ad creatives. And these are just like the videos you’re going to be running on social media as like your your ads, right? So, how I like to set up things is initially I like to have a testing campaign where I come in here and there’s a bunch of assets here right now because I start to add more over time as I’m like turning on and off different adsets. But generally to start, I like having three adsets. And within each of these three adsets, I will test out one, two, three creatives.
Ideally, you’re testing out obviously more than one creative cuz you want to be split testing your creatives to see which one has performed better meta ads. And then eventually after you test out all these different creatives and you see which one is kind of like your quoteunquote winning creative, you can then throw that into a new campaign and just start like testing out different budget ranges, different audience targeting, and just start scaling up from there. So, I’m going to take a quick pause there. Is anything anything I said that may have been like confusing or I kind of breezed over? Yeah. So, I guess one question I have there is if you have like let’s say you have this
campaign, you have all these ad groups and then you find that one creative does really well. Why would you create a brand new campaign to pour more money into it? Why not just, you know, juice up the existing ad set or the existing ad within the existing campaign you already created? I I think this goes into like different schools of thought. So, first things first, the rule of meta ads and just kind of like the rule of social media in general is test, try different things cuz what works for you may not work for someone else and what works for someone else may not work for
you, right? So, first thing first, what you said there isn’t wrong. You could 100% do that. But I personally like finding having a campaign where I’m just testing out different ad creatives and then when I find something that works, I throw it into a new campaign to kind of have like a nice separation, a nice clean Facebook ad dashboard cuz one of the most important things on Facebook ad is it can get confusing very quickly as well. As you can see here, it got it got for me even now it still got messy very quickly and that’s because I was actually like testing out different types of strategies like for the one you
just mentioned eventually I start doing that. I just start like pumping out new adsets, increasing budgets, and just running new advertisements within like the same campaign. But to start out, what I like doing was I just like having that separation of like I have a campaign for testing out ad creatives itself. And I’m going to have a new campaign that if I know ad creative works, I’m just going to have a new campaign that focuses on that specific creative. So for example, this one, all these adsets are running the exact same ad creative, which is ad one quotequote
winning ad creative. So in that campaign, you just said that you had like five different adets, but each ad set had the same exact ad creative and if I recall correctly, had the same exact targeting as well. What’s the strategy behind multiple adsets with the same ad? Yeah. So my thought process is each of these adsets are going to even though they targeting the exact same demographic and audience. So for example this one if we click into it it is targeting I call it big five or everyone calls it big five which just means United States, New Zealand, United
Kingdom, Canada, Australia and I’m doing all broad targeting. So you know I’m not targeting any specific interests or any specific age group either. But each of these adsets meta is going to go out there and find different pockets of audiences for you. So, what I’m trying to do here is I’m trying to have more variety of audience pockets just in case some of them convert better than others, right? Cuz different audience pockets are generally going to convert differently from the other ones. What
these campaigns actually are is that they’re also CPOS, which means they’re campaign budget optimizations. That means you’re giving the budget on the campaign level and then Meta is going to go into the campaign and it be spending the budget based on which audience pocket slash adset they think is going to be performing the best. So in this case obviously we give it like five different adsets and you can see like it’s not equal spend across all these different adsets cuz Meta is optimizing for what they think is like the best audience pockets that’s going to get you the most views, impressions, conversions
and all that stuff. Got it. And then I assume like let’s say we find one that’s like really really crushing it. Like let’s say in this example right here, ads set 5, it had the best purchase row ads of 1.26. Like theoretically, let’s say it was even better than that. It was like a 3.0 or a 4.0 or a 5.0. Then in that scenario, would you have shut off all the other adsets? Then that would force like the campaign budget optimization to funnel all the spend onto that adset that’s converting really well. So generally, I’ll say meta ads is pretty good at this point. being able to
funnel the spend into the adset that’s performing the best. You could do that, but unless you see Meta is terribly spending towards some of the adsets that are just losing money, some of the best practice actually to not touch it too much cuz whenever you start turning off and things on meta ads, meta can end up taking, you know, a day or two to like reoptimize the campaign for you and you might lose out on like some purchases. Because if you think about it in meta algorithm, every single time you start tweaking things, it needs to reset itself being like, "Okay, the situation
has changed. How am I going to adapt to this new change?" Right? All in all, it’s not that deep. You could 100% do that. But unless you see Meta just like horribly spending, you know, your ad budget towards like a different asset that just isn’t getting conversions, then you can definitely turn it off. Like in this case, eventually I just turned off this campaign all and off because like the campaign as a whole just wasn’t getting conversions. But let’s say I kept on running this, I would have turned off adset 4 and adset three because look, it spent $60 and $30 and then it got literally no conversions. So if I kept on running
this campaign theory, I would have turned off these other two. But just overall like I didn’t see much return from this campaign itself. So I decided to turn everything off. Got it. Got it. So then it seems like the general or higher highlevel strategy of how you set up paid ads for our SAS is just have one campaign that has a lot of different types of creatives and then if you find certain creative is kind of picking up steam doing kind of well then we’ll separate that out into a separate campaign and run a brand new campaign on that exact creative and kind of just
rinse and repeat over and over again across new creatives then run the new campaign yada yada etc. Yeah. No. So exactly. So this was originally our test campaign. So if you go into all these different adsets, you’re going to see that there was three ads that are being tested here. And then once I found the one that was performing the best. And in this scenario, if we just go in here and then we we sort by purchases, you can see all the conversions came from ad one. So I was like, okay, great. Ad one, it’s obviously a winning ad creative. CPCs are pretty looking pretty good,
too. I’ll say anything generally, you know, below 70 cents is pretty good for CPCs. Like I wouldn’t stress too much about CPMs and CTRs uh because you can have high CPMs and high CTR and then still have a good CPC, right? I’ll say CPC is the number that you’re going to want to care the most about. While you know sometimes in alternative cases, you’ll have low CPM, but if your CTR is also very low, your CPC is going to like balance out to be the same number. For you out there that don’t know what CPC stands for, it stands for cost per click. CTR is the click-through rate. how many people are clicking through to
your website for an advertisement. And CPN stands for cost per million, which mean how much does it cost per thousand impressions. So in this case, we’re paying $9.32 per thousand impressions on the ad. So, and once I found out that adin was the winning creative, like I said earlier, what I did was that I start putting into a separate campaign. So, I create a new campaign. I call interview prep add 1 CBO. In this case, I created like different assets just to find out like if Meta is going to find different pockets of audience that are going to convert well. But I had all the same advertisements because you don’t
want to give Meta too many options. Even though the Meta algorithm is very powerful, you don’t want to give it too many options of too many choices of like, oh, we’re testing out different adsets, you know, different audience pocketses, while we’re also testing out different ads, right? You kind of want to narrow the choices that Meta has to make so that it can do the best job and help me optimize your paid ad. So in this case, since I already know this is a winning ad creative, I’m just going to say I want to test out audience pockets, audience pockets, but I don’t want to be testing out different ad creatives anymore. And then obviously I started
creating new CBO campaigns as well. And this kind of like is something that I learned this time that I’m running ads. So the last time I was running ads was back in 20122 when I was doing drop shipping. And I will say meta ads ads have changed quite a bit since then in that it’s a lot more advanced nowadays. like the algorithm has gotten a lot better cuz back in the day, you know, 2021 to 2022, there was a lot more about like how you’re strategizing your ads and the targeting, the interest targeting. Like back then, you were able to target users based on their interest, right? So, for example, let’s say
Thomas, you and I are into entrepreneurship. Like, we can literally target individuals that are into like entrepreneurship, they’re into software engineering, they’re into like, I don’t know, mugs or something. But in today’s world like you can no longer do specific interest targeting on meta ads. Like meta ads has completely abolished that and everyone is doing broad targeting which sounds like a bad thing but the reality is that like because the algor has gotten so advanced you don’t even need to do interest targeting anymore. Meta is pretty good at finding the people that want to purchase your
product for you at this point. So we used to do back in the day was we’ll launch a bunch of new campaigns a bunch of new CBOS and you know just keep testing testing testing until you find something that work. But something I learned is that I launched a bunch of new campaigns and all these campaigns pretty much had the exact same setup, right? Targeting the same ads and everything. But I I realized that a lot of them kind of had similar results in terms of like the people that were purchasing and people that you know ended up buying our tools. So something I learned is that it’s not so much about you knowing and your ad strategy. It’s
more about your creative and the product you’re selling. Right? I’ll say ad strategies in 2025 makes marginal improvements rather than it being like the thing that gets you the conversions anymore. But that being said, you always want to be testing out different budgets, different regions, you know, different adset amounts and you know, test even like day partying might test your ads on different times of the day or test your ads on different days of the week. And those are all things that I tested out. But truthfully, I think meta ads at this point, it’s pretty good
that if you have a good creative, you have a good product, it doesn’t really matter what type of strategy you implement, you’re going to get the results very quickly and you’re going to find out if what you have is working or not working. If I was to go back in time and redo this again, I will still have an initial testing campaign where I’m testing out different ad creatives, but after that, I’ll throw into a new CBO, let it run, maybe test it out once again. But if that still doesn’t work, it probably means that it didn’t work, right? But over here, I I kept on testing again. Yeah, test it again. Test it again. Test it again. Thinking that things will change. But the reality is
that like even though we did get marginally better results over time, it wasn’t anything like, oh my god, like we had something that all just like exploded. It all kind of bounced out to be the same result. Makes sense. Makes sense. Yeah. Like we were kind of doing the same thing hoping for a drastically different result, but we were just getting like marginal improvements here and there, but nothing like no no like three or 4x improvement. And something I want to bring up is eventually what you said earlier of like why don’t you just test everything under one campaign. I started doing that like I think I
watched like a YouTube video. I was watching this guy. He literally just had three campaigns. He had one testing campaign and then two other campaigns where he was just scaling ad creatives and just like yeah this this should just work. Like you don’t need to make it too fancy or too complicated. Like you just need three campaigns. One for testing and then two others for like scaling different ad creatives. And what he also eventually also said he can you can just do is that you can test and scale ads in the same campaign. And that’s what I start doing here. I just start assigning a single ad to every single adset. So
over here this adset has ad four. This adset right here has ad one. And then I just start testing all the same ads in the same campaign. But I would just assign a different ad to every single adset instead. And just like just let it rip here. And if it did well, I was just going to increase the budget on the campaign level and let Meta like funnel more spend into those specific adsets/ ads. And that’s why he said like that’s what he does nowadays and that’s how he scales like seven figures cuz truthfully, you don’t need to do anything more fancy. You don’t need to do anything crazy. You can literally test and scale adsets and ads in the
same campaign now. Awesome. That’s about it. Thanks so much, Andrew, for coming in and explaining our general paid ad strategy setup and everything. Now, we’re going to zoom back out and we’re gonna go over a little bit about some of my thoughts about how paid ads work, whether I liked it or not, maybe some things we could have done better, just some general thoughts about paid ads for SAS in general. But yeah, thanks again, Andrew, for coming in. Cool. Thanks for having me. All right, so once again, thanks again to my co-founder, Mang Mangduck, on all the major social media platforms for walking us through how exactly the ad campaigns were set up for our app, perfectin.ai. But now, I’m
going to head on over back into the ads manager portal and show you some of the metrics that we were seeing. All right, so this is our paid ads dashboard within Meta. So, as you can see, we run a couple of different campaigns or so, and the total amount of money that we spent is $2600. And we got over 200,000 impressions. Our CPM, our cost per,000 impressions is roughly $11. And at the end, I think our CTR was actually looking pretty good. We were seeing a roughly a 2% CTR across all the different campaigns that we were running. And our cost per click was
relatively low as well. It was 58. And then at the very end though, our average purchase price is roughly in the $39 range. So we offer subscription tiers at various price. I believe right now it’s 30 bucks a month, 50 bucks for 3 months, or 75 bucks for 6 months. So as you can see, people are kind of split between the $30 a month plan versus the $50 for 3 months plan. That’s why the average purchase rorowaz know the average purchase price is in like $39 $40 range. And as you can see, our purchase return on ad spend is 40.47. What this means is
for every $1 that you’re putting in, that $1 is turning into 047. As you can see, we’re losing money. But that’s a quick overview of our meta ads dashboard. Let’s quickly zoom out of here, get back to the normal camera view, and I’ll talk a little bit more about my experience running paid ads and analyzing and breaking down some of these numbers. So, as you can see, paid ads is theoretically sounds amazing. It’s theoretically a money printer, but we had a little bit of difficulty. As you can see, we spent over $2,000 on paid ads, but our rorowaz, our return on
ad spend was relatively low. It was only like 04.5. So, what that means is for every dollar we were putting in, we were only getting 50 cents back. So, we were losing money from running paid ads. But that metric is only average purchase rorowz. So, that means that’s what Facebook is tracking in terms of what the user checked out with. But theoretically, since this is a subscription product, there’s a chance that, you know, with our customer acquisition cost, it was roughly around like the $50 or $60 range. Theoretically, if a user continuously subscribes for multiple months on end, that initial $30 purchase that Facebook
tracked, it could actually extend to a much bigger revenue down the line. Maybe if a user renews or stays for three or four months in the future, that $30 purchase, that low, relatively low purchase rorowaz number, it could actually be much higher because the lifetime revenue is what’s a more important metric, not just an immediate purchase rorowaz number. But I am a little bit skeptical about whether or not that’s actually going to be the case with our product. Because if you think about our product in general, perfectin.ai, if the product is successful and it actually helps the user land their job, it has churn built
into the product. In the best case scenario, the user should stop paying for a product, it should help them get a job. It’s kind of like a dating app. How dating apps in the best case scenario. It should be deleted off of your phone because the relationship should work, no longer have to pay for whatever dating app that you’re using. But I’m personally a little worried and a little scared about continuously running these paid ads because we are seeing some early metrics of users churning at a somewhat regular rate. We don’t have a great idea or great number of what exactly our customer lifetime value or
customer LTV is quite yet just because we’ve only been around for a couple months, 2 3 months at this point. But paid ads is expensive and we are losing a bit of money. Another big lesson I’ve learned during this paid ads thing is paid ads is really, really, really hard. And it is a similar game to organic social media, but it is also slightly different from organic social media as well. Don’t get me wrong, the fact that myself and my co-founder have a pretty strong background with organic social media, it does give us an edge in terms of creating these creatives for paid ads. But the strategy, the meta does feel a little different. It’s like with
organic social media, you have to kind of hook the viewer in to watch your video a little bit more. Whereas with paid ads, by default, you are paying for that view. So you can do a little bit more of product education, product selling. you can sell the product a little harder compared to organic social media. So, it’s a similar game to organic social media, but it is a very different game as well. Another big takeaway that I have had with paid ads is the fact that it is a really, really expensive game. After talking to a couple of other people in the paid ad space who are more experienced in paid ads than both myself and my co-founder,
the big takeaway that we were seeing is that paid ads is a really big testing game. It’s almost like you’re spending a lot of time in the research and development process spinning out like tens and hundreds of different creatives and testing them a lot. like spending a lot of money to test various different creatives and you’re going to lose a lot of money in this testing period. And then the eventual goal is to find that one creative that absolutely converts like crazy and it prints money like a and then at that point you just blow a ton of money into that one highly highly converting creative and that’s kind of where the money is at. So it’s a lot of experimentation in the
beginning. you lose a lot of money trying to find the right creative, the right messaging, the right targeting. And then once you find the right setup, then you run that like crazy and blow a ton of money into it. And that is where you make a lot of the return on investment with that one winning creative that you found after that giant testing process. Overall, do we plan to continue running paid ads? The answer is no. I kind of alluded to it in this video, but we do believe that we probably could find a winning paid ad strategy, but at the end of the day, we’ve been getting pretty good signal with organic social media only, and we don’t feel like we’re actually gaining that much with paid ads. And actually,
the bigger reason that we decided not to continue running with paid ads is because we’re doing a slight pivot in our business. I’m going to make a much more detailed video in the future breaking down more in depth why we’re doing this pivot. But essentially with this pivot, we’re still going to keep our existing Perfect Interview app for consumers to use. But one big shift that we’re trying to do is shift over to a B2B angle where we actually reach out to individual career coaches and try to have them host their own like career coaching platform, their interview prepping platform within Perfect Interview AI and they pay us like a flat
monthly fee. I don’t know, a couple hundred bucks a month. And we are actually betting on that being a significantly larger portion of our business than the consumer side. So because we’re going down this B2B angle, we are doing a lot more cold outreach, cold DMs instead of the paid ads route. So that’s actually the bigger reason why we’re pausing on paid ads. If we had decided not to do this pivot, this slight B2B pivot, there’s a good chance we would have continually run these paid ads and tried to figure out a strategy. But I also do think that in the end, perfect interview.ai, it is not the best candidate for a paid ads product. Number
one being, like I said earlier, it’s a product that’s supposed to have churn built into it. The customer acquisition cost that we were seeing of like the 30, $40, $50 range is pretty high. And essentially at that point you have to decide between trying to figure out how to lower the customer acquisition cost or on the other hand try to increase the LTV of your customer for your product that you’re building. I don’t quite know how low a customer acquisition cost can be but our product of perfect interview the BTOC angle of it. It just seems like the average purchase price and for now with the early metrics that we’re seeing, the average lifetime value per
customer is also kind of low where it’s really hard to make that equation match out to have a higher LTV than higher CAC because that’s the only way that you’re actually going to make money. So, I just don’t know if Perfect Interview is necessarily the best product because it’s not a super sticky product that a user will continuously pay for and use month over month. So, then we would have to figure out how do we make perfect interview.ai like a $100 or a $200 or a $300 a month product. That’s pretty tricky to do from a consumer side of things and that’s why we think we can actually make it a$100 to $200 to $300 a month product on the B2B side of things
and that’s we are pursuing that angle as well. So that is a quick overview about my experience running paid ads on Meta to promote my app via paid ads. Let me know if you have any experiences running paid ads yourself. I’m definitely not an expert. I definitely messed up a lot. I’m not claiming to be an expert at all. I’m sure there’s a lot more that I could do talk about. But let me know any comments down below your experience running paid ads. Any feedback, things I could have done better. Let me know. All right, that’s it for this video. I’ll see you in the next one. Peace.