Your Meta ads need maths, not magic
Why three out of four ads won't work — and why that's actually fine →
Well, hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the eCommercer.
I wonder if you've ever had that moment where you launch a set of ads, they perform brilliantly for a fortnight, and then everything just... stops. You look at the numbers, scratch your head, and start the whole thing again from scratch.
Yup. Me too.
What I've been thinking about this week is whether the real problem isn't the creative itself. It's that most of us — myself included — have been treating ad creative like a lucky dip rather than a system. We put a handful of ads out there, hope for the best, and then wonder why things go quiet.
This week's conversation will be a game-changer if that’s your strategy. And it connects beautifully to something a previous guest shared about turning one piece of content into fifty.
Have a great week, wherever you are in the world.
Until next time,
This Week's Episode of the eCommerce Podcast →
The Creative Engine That Stops Your Meta Ads Burning Out
This week on EP, Edwin Choi from Jet Fuel Agency made a point that sounds obvious once you hear it. That is roughly three out of every four ads you create won't work. Even if you're brilliant at this. The win rate for most accounts ranges from 25% to 35%.
That means the brands that perform well on Meta aren't the ones with better instincts. They're the ones who've accepted the odds and built a system around them.
Edwin's framework starts with two numbers most of us have never calculated. Your decay rate, which is how quickly a winning ad stops converting, and your win rate, which is the percentage of ads that actually hit your target cost per acquisition. Export your Meta data by day, feed it into an AI tool, and you'll have a surprisingly clear picture of what your account actually needs.
When he ran the maths for one account, the answer was 77 ads per month. Some need 120 during peak trading.
Before you close this email in a cold sweat, here's the part I found most reassuring. Edwin reckons most brands can get 90% of the way there without a massive budget. Start with content you've already created. Old social posts, product videos, organic clips. Then grab your phone and film something raw. Walk through the warehouse. Compare labels. Show the process. Finally, reach out to creators who've already featured your product and ask to repurpose what exists.
"Raw and unpolished and organic and authentic is probably the way to go," Edwin told me. Customers are developing what he calls "AII" — they can smell artificial content a mile off.
The other thing that stuck with me is why Meta's algorithm actually punishes sameness. Their Andromeda system now analyses the emotional tone of every ad in your account. If multiple ads trigger the same feeling — even with different visuals — it treats them as one ad. Where you once had a hundred chances to break into the auction, you now get one.
So volume alone isn't enough. You need genuine diversity in what your ads make people feel.
Edwin's Links:
Company: Jet Fuel Agency → https://jetfuel.agency
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwinchoi/
Related Episode →
The Assembly Line That Makes 77 Ads Possible
This connects to something Amelia Coomber shared a while back that I keep coming back to. She was running ads at PetPlate and faced the exact same problem Edwin describes — fatigue killing performance, constant scrambling for new content.
Her solution was to stop thinking about ads as finished products and start thinking about them as components. Instead of scripting full videos with influencers, she collected raw footage in modular pieces. A problem statement here. A benefit clip there. An emotional reaction somewhere else.
Then her team assembled those pieces into dozens of combinations. Different hooks, different problem statements, different benefit highlights. One fifteen-minute recording session could yield fifty-plus unique ad variations.
"Rather than having all of these one-off scripts from different people, which makes it incredibly difficult to test," Amelia explained, "we wanted to just get raw footage of people saying these really awesome things that are still authentic."
If Edwin's framework tells you how many ads you need, Amelia's system shows you how to actually make them without losing your mind. The two together are a proper creative engine.
Episode: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/how-to-create-ad-content-that-actually-works-amelia-coomber
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