My partner Cade will be taking charge in this email, giving you all what he’s seeing in all the ad accounts he manages. For context, Cade manages the Meta ads side of our business while I (Peterson) stay focused on the Google.

We’ve been doing this together long enough that we both have a decent understanding of the other’s platform, but tend to stick to our areas of expertise for the majority of our operations.

a quick intro (for those of you who don’t know):

Cade came to me early on in Creekside (about 4 years ago), while we were both in college, when I was just landing our first clients. I gave him the task of figuring out Meta ads for our 3, maybe 4, clients at the time. We were way undercharging, to the point of making less than $3/hr some months (possibly less lol), we a dream that we could take this to the moon.

& here we are now, about 2 years out of college with a team of 10 and dozens of clients. Couldn’t of asked for a better partner.

So without further ado, here’s his brilliant insights from Meta over the past few months.

Message match, all the way down. Every winning account follows the same spine: creative speaks directly to the target audience for that client's niche, the copy ties to that creative, and the landing page or form ties to both. That consistency from ad to conversion is the core of what makes these work, and it's the one principle that shows up in every client success story we’ve had this year.

New customer acquisition is the real optimization target. The meal prep wins this Q3 (Chris Ideson at ~20 ROAS, Punch Drunk Chef at 400%) both run on custom NCA (new customer acquisition) pixel events, not blanket purchase optimization.

Some can fall into the trap of optimizing for revenue, not realizing you can often capture existing customer quite easily with your ad campaigns. This makes you ads reports look incredible, but your business revenue could not see any improvement.

Applies to all advertising, not just Meta

Creative refresh is constant, not one-and-done. The accounts that hold their return are the ones where we're always updating creative and copy. Can’t just set and forget, your competitors are always trying to steal your market share, it’s our job to stop that every week

Counterintuitive finding: across the dental accounts, DM-style campaigns are outperforming instant forms. Often DM campaigns lead to lots of spam and unqualified leads, but in an A/B test a few months ago, our client wanted larger lead volumes as their front desk could handle it, so we tested just that.

No shock, spam went up, but so did their volume of consultations. Takeaway: always be testing, and revisit old ideas. algoritms changes

As for other notes, Cade had 2 major changes with the Youtube monitezation requirements that he wanted to share. Cade runs both our channel, and his own movie channel with 9k subs.

long form video views will now be counted like YT shorts. the SECOND some clikcs a video or sees a second of a video on a preview that is a view YET YT only counts engaged views to monetization so it is a wash of an update.

Then in Feb. 2027 YT monetization requeirments going to double for shorts views needed in 90 days and need 8k watc time from long form last 365 days rather than 4000. Trying to stop bots but in the end gonna kill small niches like knitting (not sure why he chose this as his example) that make decent side income in my opinion. Now you need 10mil shorts biews last 90 days to make ANY money off shorts.

Note: Cade had a video do 622,000 views last month and made about $61, for those of you wondering what it’s like being monetized on Youtube early on. BIG MONEY

Rolling in it,
Peterson + Cade