Ultimate Ads Problem Solving Checklist
What Makes a Media Buyer Amazing?
When ad performance declines, the difference between an OK media buyer and an amazing one lies in their response. The ideal media buyer approaches the situation methodically, using data-driven strategies to change the course of the situation. Below is a structured process that can help media buyers effectively address increasing CAC and declining ROAs.
Step 1: Diagnose the Cause
Before making any changes, it’s crucial to identify the root cause of the performance drop. Here’s a checklist to guide your analysis:
Macroeconomic and Seasonal Factors: Determine if external factors are impacting ad performance. Examples include any holidays, Christmas, Prime Day, Easter, global news events, or even weather changes (e.g., fewer users online during sunny weekends).
Technical Issues: Check that performance is really dropping, or understand whether it is a data discrepancy in Hubspot. Audit conversion actions (more on this in a different article) or determine whether it is a landing page issue, rather than an ad issue. Perhaps, form submissions are not happening, because the form is not optimized for conversion
Creative and Messaging changes: These are the bread and butter of what you do. If your creative and messaging is clear, people will convert and want to talk to you. If your creative and messaging aren’t clear, people don’t know what to do, and don’t have the patience to figure out what it is your are selling
Ad Account Setup Problems: Review campaign exclusions to ensure you’re not retargeting existing customers excessively. Make sure that your customers are on suppression lists.
Analyze metrics: Especially ones like Frequency, First-Time Impression Ratio (Reach/Impressions), and CPC trends over time. If your frequency is too high, and your audience might be experiencing creative fatigue
Campaign-Specific Declines: Isolate whether the dip is limited to certain campaigns or ad sets. If so, pausing or reducing budgets for underperforming campaigns might resolve the issue quickly. Some campaigns might have low performance due to being in the Learning phase. Don’t cut too fast either, if this is the case.
Channel-Specific Issues: Investigate if performance drops are tied to a single platform. Study whether this is due to audience, targeting, creative, messaging, and landing page. Perhaps, it is due to changes specific to that platform. Ensure blended channel performance is balanced to de-risk. Do not rely on any one channel.
Unexplainable Variance: Sometimes, poor performance stems from factors like algorithm updates or competitor spending shifts that are beyond your control.
Step 2: Wait Before Reacting
If no immediate cause is evident, resist the urge to make drastic changes. Instead:
Monitor for Patterns: Wait for at least two consecutive days of negative performance before intervening. This ensures you’re addressing an actual trend rather than regular fluctuations. Basically, be sure that this trend is real.
Avoid Overreacting: Sudden, large changes can introduce volatility into your campaigns. Patience often leads to better long-term outcomes, especially on Google Ads and Meta. If you make big changes, it is hard to know exactly what is working and what is not. You need to see ads as a long-term experiment, rather than a soup that you’re making today.
Step 3: Apply Targeted Solutions
Once you’ve identified persistent issues, implement the following strategies. I’ve listed the changes in order of easiest to hardest.
Low Complexity Fixes
Reactivate Old Creative Winners: Turn on previously high-performing ads that have been paused for over two months. These assets may regain traction and stabilize results.
Consolidate Ad sets: Evaluate your account structure for ad sets stuck in the learning phase. Consolidating them can reduce volatility and improve performance.
Medium Complexity Fixes
Cross-Test Top Creatives Across Audiences: Ensure that high-performing creatives are tested in all audience segments (e.g., broad vs interest-based targeting). This maximizes their reach and potential impact.
Re-Test Past Creative with Bid Caps: Duplicate creative testing campaigns and apply low bid caps to retest older ads at conservative costs. Gradually increase bid caps until spending aligns with target CPA.
High Complexity Fixes
Channel Mix Spend Re-distribution: It’s important to spend in the right areas. I can write a ton about this topic in itself; I’ve seen companies burn $200K on one creative per week, and that creative was running for 10 months. They burned a total of $8.6M on creative that wasn’t working on a channel that wasn’t efficient. That being said, look into your metrics and understand from a full-funnel perspective how your cost pers are (cost per conversion, cost per meeting booked, cost per closed won) across channels and campaigns. Really map this out.
Launch New Creative Quickly: Conduct a creative sprint focusing on static ads. You can create ads quickly with a combination of AI tools and Canva. I like to use Ideogram and Canva – I mark illustrations in Ideogram of what will really capture attention, and also resonate with our audience. Then, I use Canva to edit the illustration, add text, and make it really pop. I’ll write more about creative in another post, and share designs, but I think that having your text highly readable is super important. Pair these designs with top-performing headlines to inject fresh content into your campaigns.
Optimize Landing Pages: Rule number 1 of landing page is to always align the ad experience with the landing pages. Make it easy for them to understand what you’re advertising, and make it easy for them to convert. Take a look into your forms and make sure to ask for information that is completely necessary to ask for.
Final Thoughts
Great media buyers do well by studying their funnel, analyzing what changes were made, and what’s going on that causes spikes and downturns. You need to be as methodical as possible—whether it’s revisiting old creative winners, consolidating ad sets, or standing up new creative. In today’s environment, you would do best by focusing on creative and messaging first. I’ll write more about how to stand up creative in a way that makes sense for your brand, but also as a business. Your creative and messaging are everything, and you need to really nail those first.
Are you a Founder of a Series B+ company? I’ve helped Founders, CEOs, CMOs, and GTM teams at scale-ups, usually with a revenue of between $5M-$20M ARR, drive predictable revenue growth through Paid Media.
