If your Meta ads account is stuck, do this.

When it comes to growing your ad account on Meta, it is never will my account plateau, but when will it plateau.

Heck - maybe it is happening right now.

You are not alone.

There are usually three elements in the creative that affect this plateau, and I am going to help you audit your account and then build a plan to fix it.

Before we jump into the rest of the newsletter, we just relaunched content on Youtube. It is really good, and I have spent a ton of time making sure this content is great for you.

Asking the right questions

Here are the three questions I am asking when looking a stuck ad account.

1. Do the ads look the same and/or talk about the same ideas?

The best thing you can do is go to your Meta ads library, and just scroll.

Play random videos.

Look at the statics (if you have them 😉 ).

What are you seeing?

What are you hearing?

Does it all feel the same? Because if a potential customer is in the funnel and they haven’t converted, this is what they are seeing.

2. How do you come up with ideas?

I like to look at the ideation process when auditing an account because you want to understand how the strategy of the ads is being thought about.

If you are looking at competitors ads and just copying or doing things similar to them, your ads will not stand out.

How much of the work are different, original ideas?

I want to understand who is coming up with the ideas that are going into the account.

What is their process… if they have one.

Ads that work and accounts that scale are able to find formats and styles that are different than competition.

If your ideation process is to just look at your industry, this will lead to content that does not stand out and hurts performance.

3. Who are you talking to?

When you are looking at your ads, who are you talking to?

Are you speaking about general benefits or are you speaking to specific people?

An example would be for a weighted blanket. You can be speaking about the general benefit of how it can help your sleep. This ad angle could be for a guy or a girl or really anyone that sleeps.

Now contrast that with speaking directly to a person who is neurodivergent and a wired, stressed parent - those two ads will be different since they are more specific in use case.

When you are looking at your ad angles, are you speaking to specific people or just general?

General is not bad fyi - but the next level of growth comes from getting specific.

How to fix the account

The beautiful thing about asking questions is that we get answers.

And those answers can help us figure out what is next.

You could be doing some of these things correctly and still have a growth plateau.

1. If all three elements from above were off

This can happen where everything is looking the same, no original ideas, and not being specific.

If this is you, I would start by looking at how you can be specific in your targeting of person.

Then instead of copying competitors, ask yourself, what content is this specific person watching?

I would get content ideas from that content but then make it about your product for that specific person.

You do that, and you start to fix all three problems.

2. Similar looking and sounding ads

Looking and sounding the same is a common problem.

It is easy to focus on making more of the ads that work but forget that you need new ads that are different.

If ads are looking the same, then that means the structure of the ads are the same.

Videos are just a visualization of copy.

So if the videos are similar in look, that means that the structure of the copy is the same.

What can you do differently in how you are writing the scripts?

OH - and that fixes the problem of sounding the same too.

3. Ideation coming from competitors and not other sources

When performance starts to dip, it is easy to look at the competitors and try to grab some winners from them.

“If they are growing and we are selling similar products, this should work for me too.”

Kind of true, except you never stand out which becomes expensive as you are fighting for the same eyeballs with the same content.

Go away from looking at competitors.

Look at other industries, look at organic content, and look at the content your ideal customer is watching - THAT is where you can get some ideas.

Try finding formats from elsewhere and making them for your product or brand.

4. The audience is general or 1-2 people

When making ads, we want to think about the benefits and how it helps customers.

Often times, a product is great for different people for various reasons.

Let’s take my dad and myself.

We might be ideal customers for the same product, but why he buys it versus me is VERY different.

Our life stage is different and our motivations are different.

But your ads are trying to be a one-size fits all.

You might end up hooking both of us, but both of us have doubts because we think, “is this for me?”

If the ad was specific to my dad, he would be confident that this product was for him.

I would spend the time trying to map out all of the different people you can make ads for and GET SPECIFIC.

And maybe you have already done a few specific people before, now it is time to expand.

The goal is how can you talk to 40-50 different people about the same product.

Now you can’t do all 40 at once, this takes years, but the point is that you want grow by getting specific.

Get back to scaling your ads

This is a tough part about growing companies - there are growth plateaus.

It is important to be honest with yourself, your team, and your ads.

You have to be able to spot the gaps and then build content to fill those gaps.

You are not alone, but don’t complain - it is time to fix your ad problems.

Enough of me talking, let’s get back to scaling your ads.

Keep creating!

Matthew Gattozzi

PS. As I said, we are building out Youtube channel out to be the go-to resource for creative strategy and ads. I would love for you to subscribe and take a look.

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